On June 19th, I took levels 7 and 6 of the Kanji Aptitude Test, known in Japanese as the Kanji Kentei or Kanken.
This test is designed for native Japanese speakers in order to measure their proficiency in reading and writing kanji, or the Chinese characters used in the Japanese language. The test consists of levels 10 through 1, which I wrote “backwards” because 10 is the lowest level. The levels are broken down as 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, pre-2, 2, pre-1, and 1, so there are actually more than ten levels! Very roughly, levels 10 through 3 focus on the kyouiku kanji (教育漢字), or the standard Chinese characters learned in the six years of elementary school and the three years of middle school. The 2 levels are geared toward high school students applying to college or university students seeking employment, while the 1 levels include quite complex, literary vocabulary and are only attempted by the best of the best. :O
Including this guy: https://www.youtube.com/c/busensei/videos
Nicknamed Bu-sensei, this YouTuber has passed the highest level of the Kanken and offers lots of helpful advice to other people trying to achieve the same goals. Seeing that a non-native Japanese learner could pass with hard work definitely motivated me to try for myself. The main problem with my current Japanese knowledge is that although my comprehension level is on the advanced side, I stopped learning to write kanji after the LSA in 2012... which basically created a 4-year gap between the words I knew and the words I could actually write. For this reason, rather than studying JLPT N1-equivalent kanji, I went back to the very beginning.
Level 10. Again, this is the lowest level and covers only 80 kanji. These were the kanji that I had already studied during my first semester of college Japanese, and they only took me 2 days to review using the official smartphone app released by the Kanken Foundation. Honestly, the practice questions were very boring, but I’m glad I started there since I was able to re-learn some key patterns to stroke order.
Level 9. This didn’t take me very long either, and everything came back to me once I completed all the exercises in the Kanken app.
Level 8. I learned most of the kanji in this level during the LSA, but had forgotten how to write them. For some extra reinforcement, I followed the advice of Bu-sensei and began to invest into the Kanken STEP Series, also released by the Kanken Foundation. Since these are the official accompanying textbooks, they’re about as important and accurate as the College Board “blue book” is to the SAT. More on this later.
Level 7. “Uhoh, getting harder,” I thought as I skimmed through this level’s STEP book. Ultimately, this is the level I settled on. Easy enough that I would understand the questions, but hard enough that I didn’t know how to write 75% of the characters at the time I started going through the book.
Level 6. This felt about the same as level 7. Totally doable with focus and practice. Or so I thought... In hindsight, I might have been overestimating my time and ability here.
So, what is this Kanken STEP book ? Well, first, they look like this, and each level has a different animal on the cover.
Second, each chapter reviews 6 or 5 characters, outlining all on-yomi (pronunciation derived from Chinese) and kun-yomi (Japanese pronunciation), radical and radical name, and related vocabulary words. Complete with cute illustrations, because this level is primarily for children.
Third, each chapter ends with exercises. In the photo below, you can see many different types of fill-in-the-blank questions. Some ask you to write down the pronunciation of underlined kanji within an example sentence, while others ask you to write the kanji character that fits into the example sentence. For the latter type of question, the pronunciation is given as a hint, but you must be careful since many, many characters all have the same pronunciations.
Actually, between Kanken registration and test day, I was not able to get to level 6, since I had spent so much time on level 7. When I received my test vouchers in the mail, I was very excited about level 7, but only minimally confident about level 6.
Interested in hearing about test day? Join in next time for Kanken Part 2!
