May 9, 2026 · JLPT Preparation

How many kanji do you need for JLPT N5?

About 100 kanji and 800 vocabulary words. But the number alone doesn't tell you much. Here's what to actually study, how long it takes, and why most people make this harder than it needs to be.

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The number

The Japan Foundation, which administers the JLPT, doesn't publish an official kanji list. They stopped doing that after the 2010 test revision. But based on published study guides, past tests, and resources like the Shin Kanzen Master N5 series, the consensus is about 100 kanji for N5.

These are the most fundamental characters in Japanese. Numbers (一二三), days of the week (月火水), basic actions (食べる, 見る, 行く), directions (上下左右), time (年月日). If you've seen a Japanese calendar, menu, or train schedule, you've already encountered most of them.

The 800 vocabulary words matter too. Kanji at the N5 level rarely appear alone. 食 by itself is just the concept of eating. But 食べる (to eat), 食べ物 (food), and 夕食 (dinner) are vocabulary built on that one kanji. Learning the kanji and the words together is how the knowledge compounds.

Why the JLPT matters more now

On April 15, 2026, Japan's Immigration Services Agency updated the requirements for Specified Skilled Worker visas. Customer-facing roles under Categories 3 and 4 now require demonstrated Japanese proficiency at CEFR B2, which roughly maps to JLPT N2 with an upper-half score.

That means there's a new group of people who need JLPT scores and didn't plan on it. If you're working in Japan or planning to, and your role involves interacting with customers, you may now need to pass a test you weren't preparing for. N5 is the starting line for that path.

N5 to N2 is a real climb. Roughly 100 kanji at N5, 300 at N4, 650 at N3, and 1,000 at N2. But the first hundred are the foundation everything else builds on, and they're the ones you'll use most in daily life.

How long it takes

With consistent daily practice, most people can learn the N5 kanji in about two to three months. That assumes you already know hiragana and katakana, which takes one to two weeks each.

The key word is consistent. Cepeda et al. (2006) reviewed 254 studies on distributed practice and found that spacing study across multiple sessions consistently outperformed cramming, even when total study time was identical. Ten minutes a day for three months beats two hours every weekend.

I tried the cramming approach multiple times when I was preparing for N2. I'd go hard for a few weeks, burn out, stop for a month, then restart. The kanji that stuck were the ones I saw every day in small doses. The ones I crammed always faded.

The order to study them

There are two schools of thought. One says learn kanji in frequency order, starting with the most common characters in real Japanese text. The other says learn them grouped by JLPT level, since that's what the test expects.

For N5 specifically, it doesn't matter much. The most common kanji in everyday Japanese and the JLPT N5 list overlap almost completely. Characters like 日, 人, 大, 中, 学, 本, 見 appear in both lists near the top. You're not choosing between useful and testable at this level.

What does matter is learning kanji with their vocabulary, not in isolation. Studying 食 as an abstract character with readings しょく and た(べる) is slow and forgettable. Studying it as part of 食べる (to eat), 食事 (meal), and 和食 (Japanese food) gives it context and multiple memory hooks. Each word reinforces the kanji, and each kanji makes the next word easier to remember.

This was the pattern that finally worked for me after years of false starts. The more kanji I learned, the more vocabulary came with them. I could read signs, menus, subtitles. Reading unlocked everything else. Kanji wasn't the wall I thought it was. It was the lever.

What doesn't work

Writing each kanji fifty times on grid paper. I did this. It feels productive. It's not. The problem is that repetitive copying is shallow processing. Craik and Lockhart (1972) found that how deeply you process information determines how well you remember it. Copying strokes is about as shallow as it gets because your brain is on autopilot by the third repetition.

Studying readings without context. Learning that 生 can be read as せい, しょう, い(きる), う(まれる), なま, and き doesn't help you until you see it in actual words. 学生 (がくせい, student), 生まれる (うまれる, to be born), 生ビール (なまビール, draft beer). The readings stick when they're attached to meaning.

Trying to learn all the readings before moving on to the next kanji. N5 kanji have an average of two to three readings each. You don't need all of them right away. Learn the most common reading first through a vocabulary word, and pick up the others as you encounter them. Trying to memorize every reading upfront is how people get stuck on their tenth kanji and quit.

What works

Flashcards with spaced repetition. The spacing effect is one of the most replicated findings in memory research. Characters you're struggling with come back sooner. Characters you know well get pushed out to longer intervals. The app handles the scheduling so you don't have to think about it.

Karpicke and Roediger (2008) showed that retrieval practice, the act of trying to produce an answer from memory before checking, led to 80% retention after a week. Students who just reviewed the same material retained about 35%. The struggle of trying to remember is what builds the memory.

SimplyKanji organizes all 2,425 kanji by JLPT level. N5 and N4 are free. Each kanji comes with example vocabulary words, so you're always learning characters in context. The app uses spaced repetition to schedule reviews. Five to ten minutes a day is the target.

If you're not sure whether visual flashcards match how you learn, there's a free 3-minute quiz at howyoulearn.org that identifies your learning style. Some people retain better through writing or listening. Knowing your channel before picking tools saves you from repeating what didn't work.

References

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