N4 grammar organizes into seven systems: the four conditionals (と・ば・たら・なら), giving & receiving (あげる・くれる・もらう), the potential form, the volitional (～よう), the passive, the causative, and experience/change patterns (～たことがある, ～ようになる). N4 rewards understanding relationships — conditions, direction, and social perspective — not just memorizing endings.
N5 taught you to build sentences. N4 teaches you to connect them — if this, then that; someone did this for me; I can do this; it became possible. This is the level where Japanese stops being a list of phrases and starts being a system of relationships. It’s also where a lot of self-studiers stall, because English hides the very distinctions N4 makes explicit.
The good news: N4’s ~150 patterns are far more organized than they look. Learn these seven systems deeply and the rest are recombinations. Here they are, ranked by how much they carry.
The N4 Grammar Priority Map
| # | Grammar System | Why It Carries the Exam | Leverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Four conditionals と・ば・たら・なら | The most-tested N4 topic; English can’t tell them apart | S |
| 2 | Giving & receiving あげる・くれる・もらう | Encodes direction and social perspective | S |
| 3 | Potential form (can do) | Ability — and the が-object shift | A |
| 4 | Passive 〜られる | Perspective + the “suffering passive” | A |
| 5 | Causative 〜させる | Make/let someone do — and causative-passive | A |
| 6 | Volitional 〜(よ)う / ～ようと思う | Intention and “let’s” in plain form | B |
| 7 | ～たことがある / ～ようになる | Experience and change of state | B |
1. The Four Conditionals: と, ば, たら, なら
This is the defining N4 challenge. English says “if” for all four; Japanese chooses based on the logic of the condition. Get this table into your bones.
| Form | Core meaning | Restriction |
|---|---|---|
| と | Automatic, natural, always-true result | 2nd clause can’t be a request/command |
| ば | General/hypothetical condition | Usually no request if same subject |
| たら | Flexible “if / when / after” (one-time) | Fewest restrictions — the safe default |
| なら | “If that’s the case” (responds to context) | Reacts to what was just said/known |
Note the request in the second clause — と could not do this. This is why たら is the all-purpose conditional at N4.
2. Giving & Receiving: あげる, くれる, もらう
The single most “Japanese” grammar at N4. The language forces you to encode whose side you’re on when something is given. English has one word (“give”); Japanese has two, split by direction.
Same event, opposite verb. くれる is chosen because the gift moves toward the speaker’s side. You can never use あげる for “gives to me.”
Attaching these to the te-form (～てあげる/くれる/もらう) is the higher-value skill: it expresses doing an action as a favor, with the same directional logic.
3. The Potential Form: Expressing Ability
The key shift: the object particle changes from を to が. It’s 漢字が読める, not 漢字を. Godan verbs shift う→える (読む→読める); ichidan add られる (食べる→食べられる); する→できる.
4. The Passive: 〜られる and the “Suffering” Nuance
This is the concept English lacks: Japanese can put an affected victim as the subject of a passive, even for intransitive verbs like “rain.” The nuance is “it happened to me and it was a nuisance.”
5. The Causative: Making and Letting
Whether it’s “make” (force) or “let” (allow) comes from context and particles. に often signals “let,” while を on a person can lean toward “make.”
The causative-passive is the N4 boss fight: “someone made me do X and I didn’t want to.” Recognizing 〜せられる / 〜させられる on sight is worth real exam points.
6. The Volitional: 〜(よ)う and 〜ようと思う
～(よ)う is the plain-form “let’s” (行こう = let’s go). Add と思う and it becomes “I intend to / I’m thinking of” — the standard way to state a personal plan.
7. Experience & Change: ～たことがある and ～ようになる
Uses the plain past + ことがある. Compare with the non-past 登ることがある = “there are times I climb,” a different meaning entirely.
How to Actually Master N4 Grammar
N4 fails learners who memorize endings but never internalize the relationships. Three moves fix that:
- Study the conditionals and giving/receiving as contrast sets. Never learn たら alone — learn it against と, ば, and なら in minimal-pair sentences so the differences become visible.
- Drill perspective forms with a fixed cast. Use “I / my friend / the teacher” consistently so あげる vs くれる and passive vs causative become about direction, not vocabulary.
- Cloze-test yourself with spaced repetition. The JLPT grammar section blanks out exactly these patterns. Kanjijo’s SRS resurfaces each point right before you’d forget it, inside a full example sentence.
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Related Reading on Kanjijo
Frequently Asked Questions
For most learners it is the four conditionals — と, ば, たら, and なら — because English collapses them all into “if.” They are not interchangeable: と is for automatic results, ば is hypothetical, たら is the flexible all-purpose “when/if,” and なら responds to context. The second hardest is giving-and-receiving (あげる/くれる/もらう), which encodes direction and social perspective that English does not.
N4 adds roughly 130–150 patterns on top of N5, but they organize into about seven core systems: the four conditionals, giving and receiving, the potential form, the volitional, the passive, the causative, and experience/change patterns like ～たことがある and ～ようになる. Master those and the remaining patterns are mostly combinations.
たら is the most flexible conditional — it works for “if” and for “when/after” a one-time future event, and it allows a reaction in the second clause (お金があったら買います). ば is more hypothetical and general, and classically cannot be followed by a request or command with the same subject. When unsure at N4, たら is usually the safe choice.
Anchor them to direction relative to you. あげる is give moving away from your in-group; くれる is give moving toward you; もらう is receive. The key insight is that Japanese chooses the verb by whose side the speaker is on, not just who owns the object — which is why くれる always warms toward the speaker.
Master N4 Grammar with Kanjijo
Kanjijo turns N4’s tricky systems into intuition: the full N4 grammar bank teaches conditionals and perspective forms as contrast sets, the SRS engine reviews each point before you forget, exclusive mnemonics lock in kanji and vocabulary, the OCR scanner decodes real Japanese, and full mock JLPT tests plus reading and listening tracks rehearse exam pressure — all in one calm, zen app.
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