N4 is the level where Japanese stops being a phrasebook and starts being a language, and it is the level where most self-studiers stall. The stall rarely comes from the kanji. It comes from the sentence: an N4 sentence chains two verbs with a single て, tucks a plain-form clause inside a polite one, and hangs its only ます ending off the very end. No word list ever asked you to hold all of that at once.
The tracker at the bottom of this page is the list. Tick off the kanji and vocabulary you already own, tap anything you don't recognize for its dictionary entry, and watch how much of the level is left. Everything above it answers what a list can't: is N4 where you actually are, or are you still consolidating N5? And what do you do on the day you know every word in a sentence and still lose the sentence?
昨日買った本は、思ったより難しかったです。
直訳 Word by word
Yesterday bought book as-for, than [I] thought more difficult was.
Every word in there is N5 vocabulary. What makes it N4 is 買った sitting in front of 本 with no relative pronoun to warn you, and 思った turning up in plain form inside an otherwise polite sentence.
What is tested in the JLPT N4?
jlpt.jp itself describes N4 as "the ability to understand basic Japanese", the last level (alongside N5) built around what a classroom teaches rather than what daily life in Japan actually demands. In practice: reading short passages on familiar topics written in basic vocabulary and kanji, and following conversations if the other person is speaking slowly.
Getting there from N5 is a jump in volume more than in kind. jlpt.jp hasn't published an official kanji-by-level list since the test was revised in 2010, but test-prep resources widely cite N4 at around 300 cumulative Kanji (commonly cited in the 250 to 300 range, roughly 200 new on top of N5's 100) and around 1,500 cumulative vocabulary words (roughly 700 new). Those are commonly cited ranges, not JLPT-published figures. Put plainly: N4 is roughly triple the kanji and double the vocabulary of N5. Grammar points are harder to pin down still. Sources disagree by close to 2x on how to even count a "grammar point," but most study lists land somewhere around 130 cumulative patterns. Treat all of these as ballparks for building a study list, not a checklist to empty out.
The exam expands on N5 section by section. Vocabulary starts testing compound words, basic transitive and intransitive verbs, and a wider spread of daily nouns. Grammar and reading bring in potential (〜る/られる), passive (〜れる/られる), and causative (〜せる/させる) forms, alongside compound conjunctions (like 〜ながら or 〜ておく). Reading passages also double in length, which is exactly where dedicated reading strategies start to matter. Listening keeps the situations elementary: follow instructions, answer questions about what you just heard.
| Section | Time | What it scores |
|---|---|---|
| Vocabulary | 25 min | rolled into Language Knowledge + Reading (0 to 120) |
| Grammar & Reading | 55 min | rolled into Language Knowledge + Reading (0 to 120) |
| Listening | 35 min | scored separately (0 to 60) |
From N5 to N4: what actually changes
N5 rewards recall: greetings arrive whole, verbs arrive in ます form, and almost nothing asks you to change a word you were handed. N4 asks you to operate the language, and it does that mostly through one form.
The て-form is the hinge. N5 barely touches it; N4 leans on it constantly, to chain actions into a single sentence, to make a request (〜てください), to ask permission (〜てもいいです), to forbid something (〜てはいけません). Miss it and any sentence with more than one verb in it stops resolving.
友達と映画を見て、晩ご飯を食べました。
直訳 Word by word
Friend with, movie [I] watched, [and] dinner [I] ate.
見て is doing the real work here. The て-form chains two separate actions into one sentence, a pattern N5 barely tests and N4 tests constantly.
Past tense stops being a special occasion too. N5 conversations mostly sit in the present; N4 narrates what someone did, saw or ate, often stacked two or three actions deep in one sentence. The polite scaffolding comes down as well: listening sections trade the textbook ます endings for plain-form speech between friends, contracted forms, and the shortcuts nobody teaches from a word list.
Then there is what N5 lets you ignore entirely: whether the verb blames anybody. N4 puts transitive and intransitive pairs on the paper, and they look almost identical.
確認電気が消えた and 電気を消した are two characters apart. What is the difference?
消える is intransitive and takes が, so something simply happens. 消す is transitive and takes を, so somebody does it. Japanese reaches for the intransitive far more readily than English does, which is why 電気が消えた is a remark about the room, not an accusation.
There's no official jlpt.jp figure for how many hours this takes; it depends heavily on your starting point, study habits, and how close your first language is to Japanese. Test-prep resources commonly put cumulative study time from zero at several hundred hours by the point a learner is ready to sit N4. If you passed N5 comfortably on vocabulary alone, budget real time for conjugation this round, not just more words.
Common N4 mistakes to watch for
Most N4 study plans are vocabulary-heavy and conjugation-light, which is backwards. The exam punishes a conjugation slip far more often than it punishes a gap in your kanji list.
Te-form group confusion. う/つ/る verbs take って, ぬ/ぶ/む verbs take んで, く becomes いて, ぐ becomes いで, and す becomes して. Under time pressure, learners default to one pattern for everything, and 買いて instead of 買って is one of the most common slips on N4 practice material.
The second trap is register: which form you use, and where the polite one is allowed to sit.
Mixing plain and polite mid-sentence. Verbs inside a subordinate clause usually need the plain form, even in an otherwise polite sentence. と思います takes a plain verb before と, never the polite one: 雨が降ると思います, not 雨が降りますと思います. The polite ending belongs at the very end, once.
Particles cause a third, quieter kind of error: one that doesn't break the sentence, it just changes what it means.
しか without a negative verb. しか always pairs with a negative ending: お金しかない means "only money." Drop the ない and the sentence stops being grammatical, not just off in tone, which is easy to miss when you're translating "only" straight out of English.
None of these show up as their own question on the exam. They show up as the reason a reading passage or a listening clip quietly stops making sense halfway through.
Interactive N4 kanji & vocabulary tracker
Use the tracker below to check off the N4 characters and vocabulary you already have. Tap any item to open the Yomimaru Popover Dictionary, which displays Hiragana readings, pitch accents, grammatical parts of speech, English meanings, and contextual example sentences.
A ticked box means you recognized a word on a list. It does not mean you will catch that word three clauses into a sentence, in the plain form, glued to the front of a noun. The list is the map. Reading is the territory.
So use it the way you'd use a map: to find the edge of what you know, and then to leave it. Once most of it is ticked, stop grinding the list and go read real Japanese at your level, with the dictionary one tap away: something native you actually want to finish, or the reading that should follow a kanji app.
Keep Learning: Your Next Steps
Where to go next, depending on which way the tracker went:
- Back to JLPT N5 Kanji
- Advance to JLPT N3 Kanji →
- JLPT reading comprehension strategies: build the reading skills to match your growing vocabulary.