[anrakushi]

the thing you are going to find about kanji books and JLPT is that their kanji may not exactly match up. like i have 2 * 250 kanji books that contain according to a study the 500 most used kanji. i'm pretty sure i remember in level 3 of the JLPT there were kanji that were not in the book that were on the test. if you are just doing level 4 then just about any kanji book with 250-500 characters will contain the first 100 characters you need i would think.

i personally don't find kanji books very useful. i'm a mac user so i use a program called ProVoc for testing vocabulary etc. what i do is i set up each kanji in the program with 4 or more words that use that particular kanji. you try to take words from the JLPT vocab list if possible. then i get the program to ask me the words in english and i first write it in my exercise book then i type it into the program to confirm i wrote the characters correctly. if what i wrote was different to what the answer is then i mark it wrong (even if i type it correctly) so it will ask me to try again at the end. i usually do between 20-30 words each time, which relates to 5 kanji. then once i feel comfortable with those words i revise over previous ones.

it is really useful for testing you because you may have 1000+ words like i do and it will select them randomly and i can assure you there are plenty of times i sit there going ARRR i forgot it.. and if i continue to have trouble with the word i can mark it as a very difficult one to remember and test just those words randomly over and over until i have them down.

this is forcing me to remember how to write the characters, which i feel is very important, as well as recognise them when i see them. you will not be asked to write them on JLPT kanji section, it is multiple choice. but it really does help you remember.