Most apps hand you a progress bar engineered to feel good. Yokoso tracks JLPT preparation as two separate, honest numbers — because they are separate:
Coverage is how much of the N5 domain you've studied — roughly 800 words and 100 kanji, plus the core particle grammar. Readiness is whether you'd pass a timed test on it today, which depends on retention and recall under pressure, not exposure. An app that shows one number is hiding the other. Yokoso shows both, and tells you which one is lagging and why.
Against that estimated target, the web app carries 1,031 items banded N5: 747 vocabulary words and set phrases, 118 kanji, both kana syllabaries at 92 characters, 16 particles, 28 buildable sentences, 22 real-world signs, and 8 reading passages, plus 13 of the app's 20 tracked grammar patterns. It is the most completely built band in the app, which is the right way round, since it is the one that decides whether the rest of it happens.
Spaced repetition tuned toward a measured retention target (not a fixed schedule), confusable answer choices that turn your specific mistakes into contrast lessons (ください vs お願いします), leech detection that re-teaches instead of re-failing, and grammar patterns verified by transfer — you pass when you can read a sentence you've never seen, not when you've memorized the example.
The ladder continues through N1 with cumulative coverage targets, and milestones on scales that exist outside the JLPT: ILR and CEFR levels, and college-course equivalence, with linguistics field notes at the points where progress famously plateaus — so the plateau reads as physics, not failure.
The material behind those targets exists now too. The web app covers vocabulary and kanji from N5 through N1, 8,959 items in total, so nothing above you is a promise rather than a page: N4 is daily errands, N3 is the connective vocabulary of situations, N2 is newspaper and workplace Japanese, and N1 is the formal written register at the end. No learning content is locked, and no band is a prerequisite for being served the next one.
Every learning feature is free permanently — no ads, no locked decks, no review cap. If you're starting from zero, begin with the real-life material and let N5 coverage accumulate as a side effect; if you're coming from WaniKani, import your progress and keep going from where you are.
When N5 material starts feeling settled, the N4 practice guide covers what changes at the next level and how the same engine carries you there.
Levels are how progress is measured, not how days are lived. The home screen has a "Practice a situation" row: Signs & stations, Restaurants & bars, Shopping & the register, Prices, and Errands & paperwork. Choosing one narrows what gets served to that slice of life while scheduling and pacing stay global, so a focused session counts as your session and never builds a second backlog. At N5 this is the fastest route to the parts of town you use every day.
Check your N5 coverage free