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JLPT N4 vocabulary
The N4 vocabulary study set: 634 headwords in 7 reviewable batches (100 words each in batches 1–6, 34 in batch 7). The JLPT publishes no official vocabulary list; the set follows the ordering and headwords of the Tanos N4 vocabulary list PDF. Tanos describes the N4 list as NON-CUMULATIVE — designed to exclude N5 vocabulary — so N4 preparation assumes the N5 vocabulary set as the prerequisite.
The batches
| Batch | Words | Page |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 100 | N4 vocabulary — batch 1 |
| 2 | 100 | N4 vocabulary — batch 2 |
| 3 | 100 | N4 vocabulary — batch 3 |
| 4 | 100 | N4 vocabulary — batch 4 |
| 5 | 100 | N4 vocabulary — batch 5 |
| 6 | 100 | N4 vocabulary — batch 6 |
| 7 | 34 | N4 vocabulary — batch 7 |
Each batch page has two views: a compact study set table (word, reading, meaning, notes) and detailed entries per word — parts of speech, core meanings, furigana segmentation, usage notes, transitivity, an everyday frequency indicator (TUBELEX), associated kanji, related words, an original example, and at most one corpus example (Tatoeba).
Provenance and overlap with N5
- Membership and ordering: Tanos N4 vocabulary list PDF (community study set). Tanos separately advertises a 602-entry MP3/audio working set; the PDF table has 634 membership rows and the study set follows the PDF.
- Lexical facts (forms, readings, parts of speech, meanings, transitivity, usage labels): JMdict via the jmdict-simplified JSON distribution.
- Furigana: JmdictFurigana; corpus examples: Tanaka corpus via Tatoeba (each carries its sentence id); frequency: TUBELEX Japanese subtitle data — corpus frequency of everyday writing, never a JLPT prediction.
Although Tanos designed the N4 list to exclude N5 material, the canonical tables are not perfectly disjoint: two headwords (明日, 開く) also appear in the N5 list with different readings. That overlap is preserved as a source-data property.
Related pages
- N4 study guide — how the vocabulary fits into N4 study
- N4 kanji — the 166-character set taught through N4 example words
- N4 grammar — patterns that use the vocabulary
- N5 vocabulary — the prerequisite set