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Published August 13, 2026. Updated September 6, 2026

JLPT N4: what to study

For JLPT N4 you need roughly 1,500 words, roughly 250 to 300 kanji including the N5 ones, and the verb and adjective conjugation families: plain form, te-form, potential, conditional, volitional, and the first passives and causatives. Prep publishers put the grammar count around 130 points against roughly 80 at N5. None of those numbers are official. The organizers have published no vocabulary or kanji list since the 2010 revision of the test, so every figure here is a reconstruction from past papers, cited below.

The test itself is public and worth knowing before you plan anything: three sections totalling 115 minutes, scored out of 180, with 90 points to pass and section minimums you have to clear separately.

If you have not sat N5 yet, start with the N5 guide. If you are trying to decide which level to sit at all, the levels compared side by side is the faster read.

What actually changes between N5 and N4

N5N4
Vocabulary (estimated)~800 words~1,500 words
Kanji (estimated, cumulative)~80 to 100~250 to 300
Grammar points (one publisher’s list)84132
Test time90 minutes115 minutes
Pass mark80 / 18090 / 180
Official description”typical expressions and sentences written in hiragana, katakana, and basic kanji""passages on familiar daily topics written in basic vocabulary and kanji”

Read the last row twice, because it is the whole level in one line. N5 asks you to read sentences. N4 asks you to read passages. Everything in the rows above it is what that upgrade costs.

Vocabulary: about 800 becomes about 1,500

The vocabulary roughly doubles. JLPT Sensei, whose lists are assembled from words that appeared on past papers, quotes about 800 words for N5 and about 1,500 for N4, and states plainly that no official list exists for either. That doubling is the single biggest line item in the N5 to N4 gap.

Two things make it less brutal than it sounds. The first 800 included a large share of function words, particles, numbers, and time expressions, the machinery of the language. The second 800 is more ordinary content vocabulary: verbs, adjectives, nouns for daily life. It is more items but flatter learning per item.

The second thing is that word counts are the wrong unit for planning. A word you can recognize on a multiple-choice paper and a word you can use are different achievements, and only one of them is being tested. We go through how the per-level counts are built, and why they disagree with each other, in how many words you need for each JLPT level.

Kanji: from decoration to load-bearing

Estimates put N5 at about 80 to 100 kanji and N4 at about 250 to 300 in total, the N5 ones included; JLPT Sensei’s past-paper lists sit at the low end of those ranges and prep-school ladders like Coto Academy’s at the high end. Tripling a small number is not the hard part. The hard part is the change in role.

At N5 you can read most of a passage from the kana and treat kanji as landmarks. The official N5 description says as much: hiragana, katakana, and basic kanji. At N4 the description drops the script list and says “basic vocabulary and kanji,” which in practice means the passage is written the way real Japanese is written and the kanji carry meaning you cannot skip. Learners who coasted through N5 on kana usually meet the wall here rather than at the vocabulary count.

The practical consequence: readings, plural and irregular, matter now. A kanji you know the meaning of but cannot read in a compound will not help you on a timed reading section.

Grammar: patterns become conjugation

N5 grammar is mostly patterns you slot words into. です, ます, ませんか, and a stack of particles. N4 grammar is where Japanese verbs start actually changing shape, and that is a different kind of learning: not another item on a list, but a system you apply to every verb you already know.

The families that arrive around this level are plain and casual form, te-form and its long tail of compounds (てみる, てあげる, ていく), potential, conditional forms including なら, volitional, and the first passives and causatives. Coto Academy’s N4 grammar roundup is a fair sample of what that looks like in practice.

This is why grammar-point counts are the least useful number on this page. One publisher lists 132 N4 grammar points against 84 for N5, but half of the N4 entries are members of two or three conjugation families. Learn the family and a dozen “points” collapse into one rule. Grind them as flashcards and you will be memorizing the same rule thirteen times.

Listening: longer conversations, still spoken slowly

The common claim that N4 listening is faster than N5 does not survive a look at the official descriptions. N5 listening is “conversations about topics regularly encountered in daily life and classroom situations,” spoken slowly, with the task being to “pick up necessary information from short conversations.” N4 listening is “conversations encountered in daily life,” where you “generally follow their contents, provided that they are spoken slowly.”

Both say slowly. What changes is scope and stamina: real daily-life conversation rather than classroom Japanese, and following a whole exchange rather than catching one fact in a short one. The listening section also grows from 30 to 35 minutes.

Speed arrives at N3, whose description asks for “coherent conversations in everyday situations, spoken at near-natural speed.” If you are pacing yourself across the whole ladder, that is the step to save your dread for.

What the N4 test looks like on the day

From the official test guidelines, N4 runs three sections:

Scoring groups those into two sections: Language Knowledge (Vocabulary/Grammar) and Reading, 0 to 120 points, and Listening, 0 to 60 points. You need 90 points overall, plus at least 38 in the first scoring section and 19 in listening. Clearing 90 overall while missing a section minimum is a fail, which is the trap for people who are strong readers and skip listening practice entirely.

How many hours N4 takes

The study-hour figures that circulate come from a 2010 to 2015 comparison published by the Japanese Language Education Center: N4 at 400 to 700 hours for learners with a kanji background and 575 to 1,000 hours without, against 325 to 600 hours for N5 without kanji background.

The gap between those ranges, roughly 250 to 400 additional hours, is the honest price of the level. At an hour a day that is most of a year. These are school-reported estimates with enormous ranges, so use them for shape, not for a countdown. The full hours math, including what the ranges hide, is its own page.

Where a vocabulary app fits into N4 study

Moji - Learn Japanese Daily for iPhone is a vocabulary and kanji study system, not a dictionary and not a grammar course. For the N4 vocabulary line item it does the whole job: every entry carries a curated example sentence with an English meaning and a pitch-accent mark, meanings are trimmed to about three friendly glosses, and 5,880 entries carry a hand-edited mnemonic for the kanji. Scheduling is official FSRS-6 at a 90% retention target, with no configuration to do.

An honest note about our numbers. Moji’s catalog holds 8,237 words, of which 775 are tagged N5 and 730 are tagged N4, which is 1,407 words at N4 or below. Our N4 band is smaller than our N5 band, which looks backwards next to the estimates above. The reason is that Moji’s catalog is not a copy of anyone’s level list, because as noted there is no list to copy. Words are chosen and ordered by how often they actually appear, then hand-edited, and the JLPT tag is a label on each word rather than a quota to fill. So the band sizes fall where the frequency data puts them. Those are facts about our catalog, not about the exam’s scope.

What Moji does not do is teach you N4 grammar. Conjugation families need a textbook, a course, or a grammar-focused app, and no flashcard deck substitutes for that. Moji’s Sentence Build mode and its curated examples give you grammar in context, which helps it stick, but it is not instruction. Plan for a second resource.

The free tier covers the comprehension path: flashcards with mnemonics and example sentences, kana writing, vocabulary and kana quizzes, and the Daily Mix. Moji Premium ($8.99/month or $49.99/year) adds the focused drill modes, including listening, cloze, weak-words practice, and kanji writing. The placement test is free too, and worth two minutes before you start: if you are genuinely at the N5 to N4 boundary, it sets your study scope so you are not swiping through 700 words you already know.

If the vocabulary and kanji half of N4 is what you want handled, Moji is on the App Store and the comprehension path is free to try: Moji is on the App Store.

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