The Japanese-Language Proficiency Test doesn't publish official vocabulary lists, but decades of test analysis have produced stable working estimates. Here's what each level actually demands, cumulatively:
| Level | Vocabulary | Kanji | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|---|
| N5 | ~800 | ~100 | Classroom basics: set phrases, simple present/past, the survival core |
| N4 | ~1,500 | ~300 | Daily conversations on familiar topics, simple reading |
| N3 | ~3,750 | ~650 | The bridge level: newspapers with effort, most daily speech |
| N2 | ~6,000 | ~1,000 | Business-viable: meetings, news, most native material |
| N1 | ~10,000 | ~2,000 | Abstract, academic, editorial Japanese |
Those are the targets. This is the material: the web app now covers vocabulary and kanji from N5 through N1, 8,959 items in total. The counts below are per band, not cumulative, because that is how the app counts them. An N4 word advances N4 and never inflates N5.
| Level | In this band | Cumulative | Also in the band |
|---|---|---|---|
| N5 | 747 words, 118 kanji | 747 / 118 | 92 kana, 16 particles, 28 sentences, 22 signs, 8 passages |
| N4 | 589 words, 158 kanji | 1,336 / 276 | 35 sentences, 17 signs, 13 passages |
| N3 | 852 words, 338 kanji | 2,188 / 614 | 12 sentences, 3 signs, 3 passages |
| N2 | 1,602 words, 359 kanji | 3,790 / 973 | vocabulary and kanji only so far |
| N1 | 2,864 words, 1,083 kanji | 6,654 / 2,056 | vocabulary and kanji only so far |
The 2,056 kanji across all five bands are about 96 percent of the 2,136-character jouyou set. Grammar is tracked separately as 20 patterns proven by transfer, banded N5 through N3. The sentences, signs, and reading passages thin out as the bands go up, and the table says so rather than rounding the gap away.
None of this is locked and no band gates another: the app serves what you are ready for, wherever you happen to be starting.
For English speakers, the U.S. Foreign Service Institute classes Japanese among the hardest languages it teaches (~2,200 classroom hours to professional proficiency). Community studies of JLPT candidates put N5 around 300–450 hours of study, N4 roughly double that, and each level beyond roughly doubling again. The spread is wide because method dominates: spaced repetition with real retrieval practice runs several times more efficient than passive review.
"I've studied 800 words" and "I'd pass N5 today" are different claims — the first is coverage, the second is retention under time pressure. Most apps show you a single satisfying progress bar; Yokoso shows both numbers separately (here's how that works for N5), because knowing which one is lagging tells you what to do next.
For visas, many jobs, and university admission: yes, formally. For daily life: the test doesn't measure speaking at all, and plenty of N2 holders freeze at an izakaya while test-free residents chat comfortably. If you live in Japan, the honest play is both: build street-functional Japanese first, and let JLPT coverage accumulate as a tracked side effect.
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