Practicing for the Kanji Tests every week:
As a person who has never lived in Japan and never went to a Japanese school, memorising Japanese words have been very difficult for me. I used to attend Japanese tuition when I was younger but now I don’t. The only methods I could think of to memorise kanji words were:
- Flashcards
- Writing each word repeatedly
- Do practice tests over and over until I get them right
- Write them in my head (Closing my eyes and writing the words in my head)
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Method 2 is very ineffective (for me), so I combined 1, 4 and 3 (in that order). On average it takes 1.5 to 2 hours to finish practicing to assure a full mark on the test.
Talking about Method 2 in detail:
Though writing each word repeatedly seems like the easiest to prepare for, Japanese kanji consists of radicals (like Chinese). And learning the meaning of the words and being able to use them in sentences is more useful than memorising how to write them.