Here is the honest framing, before the numbers. N1 will not make your daily life in Japan noticeably easier. That work was done at N5 through N3, and by N2 you can read your payslip and answer your email. N1 is about reading depth: editorials, contracts read closely, novels, official notices written in a register nobody speaks. It is also about the long tail, the words that appear once a month and stop a paragraph dead when they do.
That is worth doing, and it is worth being clear about. Plenty of people pass N1 and still freeze at an izakaya, because the test measures reading and listening and never asks you to say anything. If your goal is a comfortable life in your neighborhood, the earlier bands are the ones that pay. If your goal is to read Japan rather than survive it, this is the band.
The web app carries 3,947 items banded N1: 2,864 vocabulary words and 1,083 kanji. It is the largest band in the app by a wide margin, which matches the shape of the level, since N1 is defined more by breadth than by any new mechanism. Like N2, this band is vocabulary and kanji only for now: the buildable sentences, signs, and reading passages that N5 through N3 carry have not been authored up here yet, and are not counted as though they had.
Across all five bands the app holds 8,959 items, of which 2,056 are kanji. That is 96 percent of the 2,136-character jouyou set, the list Japanese schooling works through and newspapers write to. The remaining few dozen are the ones you will meet in place names and legal text and almost nowhere else.
A large slice of N1 is words whose readings cannot be derived from their kanji. You do not sound these out. You learn them as units, the way you learned "colonel":
N1 contains a parallel vocabulary for things you can already say. The difference is not meaning, it is where the word is allowed to appear. These are the words of official notices, corporate email, and the evening news:
If one thing separates N1 reading from N2 reading, it is the adverbs. They are short, they are easy to skip, and they carry the writer's entire stance toward the sentence. Many of them also demand a particular grammatical partner, which the app teaches as part of the word rather than as a separate rule:
The N1 workplace vocabulary is less about tasks and more about the machinery around them, which is why it reads as cultural rather than technical:
The 1,083 kanji in this band are the ones that make news prose readable. 統 for 統一 and 統計, 策 for 政策 and 対策, 派 for 保守派 and 派遣, 挙 for 選挙, 裁 for 裁判所. Each arrives attached to a word that needs it, with a note about where you will meet it and, where relevant, which lookalikes to keep apart: 検 (inspect), 験 (test) and 険 (steep) share a right side and a great deal of confusion.
There is no placement test and no unit order. Material arrives as probes: answer correctly and the item is credited and scheduled far out, miss it and it becomes the lesson, at no penalty. If you have been reading Japanese for years and only have gaps, this is much faster than any self-assessment form, because the app finds the gaps by asking.
An N1 word counts toward N1 and nothing else. Coverage and readiness are tracked as two separate numbers, because studying a few thousand words and passing a timed test on them are different claims. The app will tell you which of the two is lagging rather than showing one satisfying bar.
A read-only WaniKani import carries your kanji and vocabulary across and re-syncs daily. A late-level WaniKani account overlaps this band substantially, and everything that matches counts as known immediately instead of being quizzed at you again. Yokoso is independent of WaniKani and not endorsed by it.
Every learning feature is free permanently. No ads, no streaks, no locked lessons, no review cap. Optional supporter contributions unlock nothing, because nothing is locked.
Yokoso runs in a browser, works offline, and can go on your home screen with its own icon in about a minute: here is how, and why the web version is usually ahead. It is also on the App Store, where updates land once App Store review clears.
If N1 vocabulary is arriving faster than it sticks, that is usually a sign the band below is still thin: N2 is the newspaper and workplace layer, and N3 is the connective vocabulary under that. The levels guide puts all five bands in one table with the hours each realistically takes.
Yes, every learning feature, permanently. No ads, no streaks, no locked lessons and no review cap.
It depends on what you want. For daily life, N3 and N2 do most of the work. N1 matters for reading depth, for some jobs and university programs, and for the written register that official documents use. It is a reading credential more than a living one.
Not yet. The N1 band is vocabulary and kanji today. Sentences, signs, and passages exist for N5 through N3 and are planned for the higher bands.
Almost. There are 2,056 kanji across all five bands, which is about 96 percent of the 2,136-character jouyou set.
Yes. Progress lives on your device, and syncs across your own devices when you choose to turn that on.