しあわせ

漢字学習ステップ８級 published by: 日本漢宇能力検定協会

Another book to prepare for the kanken test. This time it is an official book published by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation. It is a textbook for Japanese people, completely in Japanese and requiring a vocabulary beyond that which the kanji might suggest. Maybe it’s for grade school children but I’m certain parts of it are intended for their parents.
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Do you miss out small tsu?
Forget when to lengthen a vowel?
Use the wrong voicing?
Help may be at hand from Purdue University. It is an old project (the last update was 2002) but they have available custom dictionaries for Japanese IME systems. I downloaded the extra dictionaries for Kotoeri. They also have files for Windows XP.
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Since MacOS X was first released the built-in support for Japanese has been excellent. Everything you need for Japanese is in the standard installation. It’s there when you want it. It just works; no searching around for install disks. I recently installed Windows XP using Parallels on my Mac. Boy it’s clunky. Mac is the way to go for Japanese. Doubly so because, if you want, with an Intel Mac you can get Windows too.

Japanese support was a big reason for me to go OS X several years ago. It was a deciding factor on Leopard as well.
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漢字練習ノート・小学２年生　author: 下村昇 published by: 偕成社

Inspired by the upcoming Kanken test in June I went looking for some Kanji texts in JP Books yesterday. This workbook is one of the two books I bought. It is a companion volume to a more comprehensive yet small book 漢字の本2年生

As I wanted to use it more for revision I decided to skip the main book and just use the workbook. Also the main text being entirely in Japanese (as is the workbook by the way) needed more concentration than I really wanted to give to it. However I think once you reach a certain level it’s very useful and satisfying to work in an all Japanese environment.

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English words made only from twenty-six characters? Are English a bit lazy or what? We have fifty thousand characters in Chinese

— A Concise Chinese - English Dictionary for Lovers — Xiaolu Guo

On Sunday 22 June at SOAS in London the 11th Kanji Aptitude Test in the UK will take place.

There are 12 levels ranging from level 1 with 6000 kanji, Genius level! to Level 10 with 80 kanji, primary school level. Each test takes 1 hour. The pass mark is a relatively high 70% or 80%.
Pretty much the real deal.
You can find details of the levels here.
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