JLPT N4 Kanji List: The ~170 New Characters After N5
N4 adds roughly 170 kanji on top of N5, covering everyday verbs, adjectives, and places. Here's the themed list and how N4 differs from N5.
With N5's 100 kanji as your base, N4 roughly doubles your character count and pushes you from “survival” into genuinely useful everyday reading.
What N4 adds
N4 introduces more abstract and verb-heavy kanji: feelings, movement, society, and the building blocks of grammar you'll meet at this level. The total cumulative count after N4 is around 300 kanji.
Everyday verbs and actions
People, society, places
Nature and description
How N4 study differs from N5
- More compounds: you'll combine N5 and N4 kanji into two-character words, so reading on'yomi becomes essential.
- Verbs with okurigana: many N4 kanji are verb stems (始める, 終わる), so learn the conjugating tail too.
- Expect grammar and kanji to reinforce each other at this level — study them together.
Learn kanji the reading-first way
Kanji 360 wraps every character with mnemonics, audio readings, stroke-order animation, and SRS scheduling — free to start on iPhone, iPad, and Android.
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