N3 kanji: the list with readings and meanings
Three hundred and sixty-seven new characters, taking the running total to 612. That is more than double everything learned to get this far, and it is why N3 has a reputation as the wall.
The nature of the characters changes too: this is where the abstract ones arrive — 政, 治, 経, 制 — the ones that don't describe something you can point at, and that almost never stand alone.
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Why N3 is where people give up
It isn't the difficulty of any single character: it is the amount piling up while everything before still needs maintenance. At 612 kanji, every day of new study drags a day of overdue review behind it, and without a system for that you end up chasing. Most people who quit here didn't find the kanji too hard — they simply stopped revisiting them.
The abstract characters
At N5, 山 is a mountain and you can draw it. At N3 you meet 制, 察, 態 — concepts that exist only inside compounds and mean almost nothing pointable on their own. Learning them as isolated symbols doesn't work: take them inside two or three words that actually use them, and the reading settles with them.
From here compounds multiply
With 612 characters in hand, the number of possible combinations explodes: 政治, 経済, 社会, 制度 are all made of pieces you already know. This is the stage where study starts paying for itself — you recognize words you have never seen by taking them apart — and reading stops being decipherment.
How far they actually take you
With N3 you can read simplified news, the signage of any office, menus without pictures and much of a novel for young readers. A real newspaper stays hard work but is no longer impenetrable: you start understanding headlines, which is the first sign the language is opening up.
The 367 kanji, in study order
Grouped by theme as at the other levels, though by this point more than four in five land in "general words" and "verbs": this is the level where vocabulary stops being sortable by subject.
The body
Nature
Basic verbs
People & family
Position & measure
Useful words
City & transport
Study & language
Time & calendar
Readings from KANJIDIC2 (© EDRDG, CC BY-SA 4.0), via kanjiapi.dev. Meanings, grouping and study order are Yukigo's own.
Take the list with you
The PDF is made for printing: grouped by theme, with readings and meanings, to keep in sight while you study.
612 kanji need a system
At this level review matters more than new study. Yukigo keeps the count for you: every kanji comes back just before it slips, inside real words, with handwriting and audio. Free and ad-free.
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Frequently asked questions
612 cumulative: 79 from N5, 166 from N4 and the 367 at this level, following KANJIDIC's classification. It is the biggest jump between two consecutive levels in the whole JLPT.
Because it is the first level where the review load overtakes the study load: keeping what you know costs more time than learning what is new. The jump in reading difficulty is real, but it is the maintenance that stops people.
At five a day, a little over ten weeks to see them all once. In practice it takes longer, because every day a slice of the time goes to the kanji of the previous levels.
Not for the exam. But at this level look-alike characters multiply — 待 and 侍, 験 and 検 — and writing remains the quickest way not to confuse them, because it forces you to look at the components one at a time.
Another 367, bringing the cumulative total to 979. The difference is that N2's new characters show up mostly in written text: journalism, non-fiction, documents.