I was always rather shocked at the vocabulary lists for the JLPT - while the lists for 4/3kyuu were at least not *too* long, you reach the thousands with the 2 and 1 lists; while this isn't bad by itself, the vocab is in no way organized to help in memorizing them. I remember my old textbooks having vocab lists that were based on themes, reading passages, etc. With the JLPT, though, you've just got a huge list that isn't really fun to tread through.
This is but one of many reasons why I love the kanji kentei not just for studying kanji, but also for increasing my vocabulary bank. The kanji kentei, if you don't know, is a kanji character proficiency test geared for Japanese students (as in Japanese people, not those studying Japanese). It's got 11 levels for testing, each containing 80-320 kanji.
Both the famous 'Step' books in Japan (yellow books that break up the kentei levels into 'steps' of 6-8 kanji, making it much easier to digest) and renshuu's kentei materials allow you to study with an emphasis on vocabulary, using kanji as a base/building-blocks. By having a set of 5-8 vocabulary that all use a particular kanji, it's much easier to define the kanji's meaning, as you can see how it combines with other kanjis to often make very logical combinations. Subsequently, grouping vocabulary by kanji allows the 'theme' of that kanji's definition to help create a web in your head of the various vocabulary meanings; no longer are they random words pulled out of the JLPT set, but have relations to one another, making it easier to fortify in your head.
This by itself is enough of a reason to consider using the kanji kentei to help prepare for tests such as the jlpt. However, there is another much, much, much more important reason that makes this method of study vital.
Japanese employs a much smaller set of phonemes (sounds) to make up all the potential pronunciations in the language when compared to English. You never have more than 2 characters combining together at a time, in the sense that saying おはよう is (phonetically) three pieces: お、は、よう. The low number of these sounds make it so that the same sounds are seem to come up more often.
So let's take an example that everyone knows: こうこう (high school). If you were to learn this term without any knowledge of the kanji, you'd see the spelling as 4 seemingly-unrelated hiragana. That's not too easy to remember, right?
However, if you first learn the kanji 高 and 校, the hiragana rearrange themselves into the pieces こう and こう. Instead of having to remember 4 individual hiragana, you're remember 2 much richer pieces of information, the two kanji. Vocabulary becomes less of a list of words, and more of a web of kanji connected to one another.
Often when I'm listening to someone talk in Japanese, the kanji's readings start popping into my head, assembling themselves into pairs and words so that the string of syllables entering my ears becomes something I can understand more easily. It's the same reason why, if you know the kanji, reading a sentence with kanji is much much easier than reading a sentence with only hiragana.
1. わたしはみやぎけんのちゅうがっこうでえいごをおしえています。
2. 私は宮城県の中学校で英語を教えています。
Hopefully this makes sense. While I'm eventually aiming for 1kyuu of the jlpt, I'm currently studying 5kyuu of the kanji kentei and I feel much more confident about the progress I make and the material I learn.
The site's kanji kentei materials are geared towards someone studying for the JLPT - there is a heavy preference to use jlpt vocab in the vocab lists generated for the kanji kentei levels. However, as you get to the higher levels, there isn't enough jlpt vocab to make up sufficient lists to study the kanji, so I'm currently making both an improved jlpt list and a non-jlpt biased list (that instead focuses on getting the best cross-section of vocabulary to cover all the readings of any given kanji) of vocab for studying the kentei.
