JLPT N4 Kanji List: All 183 Kanji, Grouped the Way They Stick

Why N4 kanji feel so much harder than N5

Most learners finish the N5 kanji with a quiet sense of victory. About a hundred characters, many of them pictures you could almost guess (山, 川, 木, 人), and every one of them used in a word you already knew. Then N4 begins, and the feeling changes. The characters get denser (曇くも, 験けん, 働はたら), the list nearly doubles, and suddenly the same character seems to have a different reading in every word.

It is worth understanding why, because the cause points directly at the cure.

N5 gave you 父, 母 and 子. N4 completes the family tree, and it does so with a pattern worth noticing: the plain forms 兄, 姉, 妻 are what you say about your own family, while お兄さん and お姉さん are for someone else’s. The kanji are the same; the in-group and out-group rules decide the word around them.

The four season kanji arrive together and are best learned as a set, exactly like the seven weekday kanji at N5. 晴れ and 曇り are the two symbols on every Japanese weather app, and 回 and 度 are the counters for “times” that you will use daily: 一回, 二回, もう一度.

This group turns menus and clinic signs from pictures into words. Notice how often these characters pair up with each other: 料理, 病院, 医者. Learning them together means every new character arrives already half-inside a word you know.

These ten verbs describe an ordinary day from 起きる to 寝る, and most of them are kun’yomi with okurigana. Watch 降: it reads お(りる) when you get off a train and ふ(る) when rain falls, one shape with two unrelated verbs.

You are the target audience for this group. Almost every character here appears inside a two-kanji compound that you will read in instructions on the JLPT paper itself: 問題, 質問, 試験, 答え.

Seven kanji, but they carry a lot of daily Japanese. 借りる and 貸す are the classic N4 pair that learners mix up (borrow versus lend), and 売り場 is on the floor directory of every department store.

Almost every character in this group has a partner: 明 and 暗, 重 and 軽, 暑 and 寒, 近 and 遠. Learning each pair together halves the effort, because one card reminds you of the other. The two traps are 早い versus 速い and 暑い versus 暖かい, covered below.

The first half of this group is how you talk about thoughts: 思う, 考える, 知る, 意味. The second half is how you talk about work. 仕事 and 働く alone appear in a huge share of N4 reading passages.

This group reads like a map legend. It runs from administrative units (町, 村, 区, 市, 県, 都) through nature (池, 林, 森) to buildings (屋, 堂, 園). If you can read this group, you can read a Japanese address and most of a station map.

Eight characters that live in hobbies: 音楽, 映画, 写真, 旅行. They are among the easiest N4 kanji to retain, because learners meet them constantly in the Japanese they choose to consume.

Most of these kanji describe something moving or changing state, and several come in pairs again: 開 and 閉, 始 and 終. 開 and 閉 are also the two buttons in every Japanese elevator, which makes them some of the most useful characters on this page.

This group is abstract, but it pays back more than any other. 不 alone negates dozens of words (不便, 不安, 不足), 特別 and 特に are everywhere, and the pair 洋 and 和 sorts the whole of Japanese life into Western-style and Japanese-style.

The final group mixes high-frequency building blocks (自, 同, 以, 元) with three animals that close the level gently. 自 alone begins 自分, 自転車 and 自動車, and 以 gives you 以上 and 以下, which appear in every exam instruction and every price rule.

The irregular readings N4 loves to test

Some words take a reading that belongs to the whole word rather than to its characters. Japanese calls these 熟字訓 (jukujikun), and a handful of them built from N4 kanji appear on N4 papers again and again. Learn them as single units; decoding will not help.

For the full story of why kanji have multiple readings at all, see on’yomi vs kun’yomi, and for the special readings that run all the way to N1, special kanji readings.

A six-week plan that actually finishes

Thirty kanji a week sounds like a lot, but it is about four or five a day. The number that matters is not how many you add but how many you keep, and that depends almost entirely on review timing. A character reviewed just before you would have forgotten it is strengthened far more than one reviewed too early or too late; this is the spacing effect, one of the most reliably replicated findings in memory research.