JLPT N5: What's on the Test and How to Pass It

The N5 is the easiest of the five JLPT levels. It checks that you can read hiragana, katakana and a small set of kanji, follow short written passages about everyday things, and understand slow, simple spoken Japanese. Everything is multiple choice. You don't speak and you don't write any Japanese, you fill in circles on an answer sheet with a pencil.

Here's the shape of the test day.

There are breaks between the sections. These times have applied since the December 2020 test, when the N5 was shortened, so older prep books may show longer ones.

The vocabulary section

Twenty minutes, four kinds of question. The sentences are written mostly in hiragana with spaces between the words, which real Japanese doesn't have. It's a courtesy for beginners that disappears at the higher levels.

• Kanji reading. A word in kanji is underlined and you pick its reading. In あたらしい 車を かいました (I bought a new car), you'd choose くるま for 車.
• Writing. The reverse. A word is underlined in hiragana and you pick the correct kanji or katakana. The wrong options are look-alikes, so for やすい you might have to find 安い among three near misses.
• Fill in the blank. まいあさ コーヒーを （　） with four verbs to choose from. The answer is のみます (drink).
• Same meaning. You read a sentence and pick the one that says the same thing in other words. この へやは きたないです (this room is dirty) matches この へやは きれいじゃ ありません (this room isn't clean).

Grammar and reading

This is the longest paper, 40 minutes, and the one where people run out of time. It opens with grammar. Most of those questions are a blank that needs a particle or a verb form: わたしは バス（　）がっこうへ いきます needs で, because you go to school by bus.

Then come the sentence scramble questions, which catch people who haven't seen one before. You get a sentence with four blanks, one marked with a star, and four pieces to put in order. You only answer which piece goes in the starred blank.

つくえの ＿＿ ＿＿ ★ ＿＿ あります, with the pieces 本, に, が and 上. The full sentence is つくえの 上に 本が あります (there's a book on the desk), so the star is 本.

A third grammar type gives you a short text with several blanks to fill. The reading part follows: a few short passages (a note, a message, a diary entry), one longer passage, and an information question where you search a notice, timetable or price list for a specific answer. Harder kanji have furigana printed over them.

Particles carry a lot of this paper. If は, が, を, に, で, へ, と and も still feel like guesswork, that's the first thing to fix.

Listening

Thirty minutes of recorded audio, played once. There's no replay and no pausing, and the questions come in four formats.

• Task questions. You hear a conversation and decide what the person will do next: which bus to take, what to buy, what time to meet. The choices are printed, often as pictures.
• Key point questions. You hear the question first, then the conversation, and listen for one detail, such as why someone was late.
• What would you say? A picture shows a situation with an arrow pointing at one person, and you choose what that person should say from three spoken options. Someone stepping into a friend's home would say おじゃまします.
• Quick response. Nothing is printed. You hear one short line, then three possible replies. おげんきですか should get はい、げんきです.

The quick response questions go by fast. If you miss one, let it go and mark a guess, because the next one starts a few seconds later.

Scoring and the pass mark

Although you sit three papers, the N5 reports two scores. The vocabulary paper and the grammar and reading paper are combined into one score out of 120. Listening is scored out of 60. That makes 180 in total.

You have to clear all three numbers. Someone who scores 100 on the first section and 15 on listening has 115 points, well over 80, and still fails. It tends to catch people who studied only from books.

The scores are scaled. They aren't a count of correct answers, and the organizers don't publish how many questions you need to get right. Wrong answers aren't penalized, so never leave a circle blank.

How much Japanese N5 covers

There's no official list of N5 kanji, vocabulary or grammar. The organizers stopped publishing test content specifications when the current format began in 2010. The lists in textbooks and apps are reconstructions, based on the old specifications and on what has appeared in past tests.

The pre-2010 guideline for the equivalent level described about 100 kanji, about 800 words and around 150 hours of study. Treat those as rough sizes. Unofficial N5 lists today usually land between 80 and 110 kanji and somewhere around 700 to 800 words. Our N5 kanji guide goes through the characters that appear on nearly all of them.

Grammar is the beginner core: です and ます forms, past and negative, the て form and a few things built on it (ています, てください), adjective conjugation, basic particles, counters, and time and location words. If you've finished a first-year textbook such as Genki I or the first book of Minna no Nihongo, you've seen all of it.

When and where it's held

The JLPT runs twice a year, on the first Sunday of July and the first Sunday of December. Not every country or city holds both sessions. Some offer only one, so check your local test site before you plan around a date.

Registration closes months ahead, often around March or April for July and August or September for December, and each local host sets its own dates and fee. Popular sites fill up. Results take about two months, and paper score reports reach test takers outside Japan later still.

How to prepare

• Get kana to reading speed first. Forty minutes for grammar and reading is tight if you're still sounding out each character. If hiragana isn't automatic yet, that comes before anything else.
• Learn kanji inside words. The test never asks what a single kanji means. It asks how 車 or 学校 is read in a sentence, so study readings through vocabulary.
• Do listening every day. It's a third of the score and has its own minimum. Ten minutes of beginner audio daily does more than an hour once a week.
• Take a timed mock test. The official JLPT site has free sample questions for every level, and there are official practice workbooks. Sit one under real timing at least a month before the test so you find out about pacing problems while you can still fix them.
• Practice the answer sheet. It sounds silly, but filling circles takes time, and people do lose marks by shifting a row. Mark as you go and don't leave it all for the last minute.

N5 questions