JLPT N5 Kanji List: All 80 Core Characters

Why nobody can tell you the exact number

Search “how many kanji for N5” and you will get 80, 100, 103 and 120 from four different pages that all sound confident. They are not contradicting each other by accident. The JLPT stopped publishing official vocabulary and kanji lists when the exam was redesigned in 2010. The official line since then is that the test measures what you can do with the language, and the published guidance describes N5 as “the ability to understand some basic Japanese” rather than naming a character set.

So every list you find is a reconstruction — built from the old pre-2010 Level 4 syllabus, from past papers, and from the beginner textbooks the exam tracks closely. Those reconstructions overlap almost perfectly on a core of 80 characters and then disagree about a fringe of roughly twenty more (週しゅう, 曜よう, 駅えき, 店みせ, 買か, 会かい and friends) that sit exactly on the N5–N4 seam.

The practical answer: learn these 80 properly and the fringe takes care of itself, because the fringe characters live inside words you will meet anyway. What follows is the 80, in the order that builds real words fastest.

These come first because everything else in beginner Japanese is bolted to them: prices, clock times, dates, ages, quantities, floor numbers, platform numbers. Fourteen characters buy you an enormous amount of readable text.

The seven weekday kanji are the same seven characters as sun, moon, fire, water, tree, gold and earth — the days are named after the classical planets, exactly as Sunday and Monday are in English. Learning them as a set of seven gives you the whole calendar at once.

This group pays for itself the first time you stand in a Japanese station. Every exit sign is one of these plus 口ぐち: 東口ひがしぐち, 西口にしぐち, 南口みなみぐち, 北口きたぐち.

These eleven do two jobs at once. In sentences they are your core verbs; on walls they are signage — 出口でぐち exit, 入口いりぐち entrance, 休やすみ closed.

The seven irregular readings N5 loves to test

Most N5 kanji behave. These seven do not, because they are 熟字訓じゅくじくん — readings attached to a whole compound rather than to its parts. You cannot decode them; you memorise them as single units, the way an English speaker memorises that colonel is pronounced “kernel”.

A four-week order that actually finishes

Eighty characters is not a lot. What kills beginners is not volume, it is ordering — learning 雨 and 川 in week one, before the numbers that appear in every single sentence. Do it in this order and each week's kanji immediately make the previous week's sentences longer.

Two rules make this work. First, never learn a character alone — learn it inside the example word in the tables above, so the reading arrives attached to something. Second, review on a schedule, not on a whim. Kanji recognition decays on a predictable curve; the review that matters is the one that lands just before the character fades, which is the entire point of a spaced-repetition system.

What comes after the 80

The borderline characters — the ones that push some lists to 103 — are worth adding the moment the core 80 feel automatic: 週しゅう week, 曜よう weekday, 駅えき station, 店みせ shop, 買か buy, 会あ meet, 社しゃ company, 安やす cheap, 新しん new, 古ふる old. Officially most of these sit on the N4 line. Practically, you meet them on day one of living in Japan, and 曜よう appears inside every weekday word you already learned in week two.

After that, N4 roughly doubles the count to around 300 characters, and the jump that follows — N3 at roughly 650 — is the real cliff. The map for the whole climb is in JLPT Levels Explained.