Abstract
The State Examination for Certified Care Workers has been conducted based on new curriculum since the academic year 2011. Care worker trainees under the current Economic Partnership Agreements(EPA) may choose examination questions with hiragana assistance for kanji readings from 2012. However, kanji learning for the new curriculum examination is still as important as in the previous curriculum. This paper examines the frequency and trends of the kanji that appear in the prioritized list of nursing-care technical terms which had been selected in a previous study. In addition, it also analyzes both character-based coverage and term-based coverage of the kanji used in the technical terms. The results show that 1)more than 80% of the kanji used in the technical term list are categorized in former JLPT level 2 or higher and 2)by studying kanji that are most frequently used in the list, one cannot improve his/her term-based coverage as efficiently as he/she can improve character-based coverage of the kanji.
