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Published August 13, 2026. Updated September 6, 2026

How many words do you need for the JLPT?

The estimates you will see quoted almost everywhere are about 800 words for N5, 1,500 for N4, 3,750 for N3, 6,000 for N2, and 10,000 for N1, each figure cumulative rather than per level. Those numbers are useful, and they are not official. The JLPT has published no vocabulary list since the test was revised in 2010, so every count on this page, including ours, is an estimate from a publisher, a prep school, or a catalog like ours. Anyone presenting a per-level word count as the official requirement is guessing with confidence.

Why there is no official JLPT vocabulary list

The organizers explain the decision directly in the jlpt.jp FAQ: “We believe that the ultimate goal of studying Japanese is to use the language to communicate rather than simply memorizing vocabulary, kanji and grammar items… we decided that publishing ‘Test Content Specifications’ containing a list of vocabulary, kanji and grammar items was not necessarily appropriate.” What jlpt.jp offers instead is the Summary of Linguistic Competence Required for Each Level, which describes N5 as “the ability to understand some basic Japanese” and N1 as “the ability to understand Japanese used in a variety of circumstances.” No counts appear anywhere on it.

The old test, running from 1984 to 2009, did publish a Test Content Specification, and that is where the familiar ladder came from. Level 4 was specified at roughly 800 words and 100 kanji, Level 1 at roughly 10,000 words and 2,000 kanji. Even then the specification allowed about 20% of the material in any given exam to come from outside the published lists. The modern N5-to-N1 numbers are largely those old figures, remapped and adjusted.

Published per-level estimates

Two independent prep sources, one a Tokyo language school and one a study-tool publisher, land in the same place:

LevelVocabulary (cumulative)Kanji
N5~800~100
N4~1,500~300
N3~3,700 to 3,750~650
N2~6,000~1,000
N1~10,000+~2,000+

Two things about this table matter more than the numbers. First, the counts are cumulative: N4’s 1,500 includes N5’s 800, so the N4 band itself is only about 700 new words. Second, the sources agree because they are drawing on the same lineage of old official lists and shared community analysis, not because five separate studies converged. Treat the table as a well-informed consensus, not as measurement. There is more on what the levels actually test in JLPT levels explained.

What Moji’s catalog contains, by level

Moji - Learn Japanese Daily for iPhone tags every word in its catalog with a JLPT level. Here is the actual distribution, which is a fact about our catalog and not a claim about official JLPT scope:

LevelWords in MojiRunning total
N5775775
N47301,407
N32,2883,508
N21,9845,043
N12,2528,029

Plus 208 kana-stage entries, which are the hiragana and katakana characters themselves, each taught as a card paired with a real word (あ with あめ, ア with アイス). Those are characters, not vocabulary, so they sit outside the totals above.

Compare the running total against the published estimates and the shape matches closely through N3, and then diverges. Our N5 and N4 bands land near the 800 and 1,500 figures. Our N1 total of 8,029 sits well short of the quoted 10,000, on purpose: the catalog is sized around the part of the frequency curve where each new word still buys real comprehension, which we cover in detail in how many Japanese words you need. If your goal is specifically to sit N1, expect to read widely beyond any app’s list.

For the beginner end, the N5 guide and the N4 guide walk through what each level covers, and the N5 vocabulary app comparison covers tool choice.

What “knowing” a word actually means here

A word count is only meaningful alongside a definition of knowing. Moji uses FSRS-6, the current version of the FSRS spaced repetition algorithm, with a target retention of 90%. That is the design point: the forgetting curve is calibrated so a card comes back around the moment your predicted recall drops to 90%. So “775 N5 words” in Moji means 775 cards scheduled to sit at roughly nine-in-ten recall, not 775 words seen once.

That distinction cuts both ways. Recognizing a word on a multiple-choice test is a lower bar than producing it in speech, and the JLPT is a recognition test, which is part of why list-based study works for it at all. It is also why a raw count of words “studied” in any app tells you very little on its own.

How long the word counts take in practice

The Japan Foundation’s Japanese Language Education Center collected self-reported study hours from learners in Japan between 2010 and 2015. For learners with no prior kanji knowledge, the reported ranges run about 325 to 600 hours for N5, 950 to 1,700 for N3, and 3,000 to 4,800 for N1. Learners who already read Chinese characters report substantially less at every level.

Those spreads are enormous, and that is the honest finding: the same vocabulary target costs one learner twice what it costs another. Vocabulary is also only one of three tested components, alongside grammar and reading, so hitting a word count is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. How long it takes to learn Japanese goes further into the calendar math.

If you want a frequency-ordered path with JLPT filtering built in, every word carrying a checked example sentence, Moji is free to try, and the whole comprehension path stays free: flashcards, mnemonics, example sentences, kana writing, and the daily quiz. A free placement test at the start puts you roughly where you actually are. Moji is on the App Store.

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