N4 kanji: the list with readings and meanings
One hundred and sixty-six new characters, taking the running total to 245. They're grouped by theme in study order, and there's a printable PDF at the end of the list.
Compared with N5, it isn't only the quantity that changes but the kind of kanji. The concrete ones — sun, mountain, person — give way to characters describing actions, states and relations, and those almost always live inside two-character compounds.
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What changes compared with N5
At N5 nearly every kanji is a word on its own: 山 is "mountain", 人 is "person". At N4 most of them work in pairs — 旅行, 病院, 家族 — and the reading depends on the combination. This is the point where you stop learning characters and start learning words that happen to be written in characters.
On and kun: here the choice stops being arbitrary
Compounds bring out the practical rule: two kanji together usually take the on reading (旅行 = りょこう), a kanji followed by hiragana takes the kun (行く = いく). It isn't a law, but it guesses right most of the time — and at N4 it finally becomes useful, because compounds are everywhere.
They don't arrive all at once
At this level the effort isn't recognizing them but holding on to them: 245 cumulative characters is past the point where short-term memory copes alone. People who stall at N4 have usually not stopped studying — they have stopped reviewing what they already saw.
How far they actually take you
With 245 kanji you can read a menu end to end, hospital and station signage, basic instructions, and much of a manga for young readers with furigana. Newspapers and fiction stay out of reach: those want N3 and beyond.
The 166 kanji, in study order
The groups are more lopsided than at N5: "general words" and "verbs" take more than half of them. That isn't a flaw in the grouping, it is the level — vocabulary stops describing the world and starts describing what happens in it.
Time & calendar
The body
Nature
City & transport
Basic verbs
Useful words
People & family
Study & language
Position & measure
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.
245 kanji don't stay by memory alone
At this point the problem isn't meeting them, it's not losing them. Yukigo teaches them inside real words and brings each one back through spaced repetition exactly when it is about to slip, with handwriting and audio. Free and ad-free.
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Frequently asked questions
245 cumulative: the 79 from N5 plus the 166 at this level, following KANJIDIC's classification. Other lists give slightly different numbers because they mix the old four-level scale with the current five-level one.
Yes, and not for the exam but for reading: many N4 kanji form compounds precisely with the N5 ones, and without that base a compound stays two separate symbols instead of becoming a word.
Because at this level vocabulary stops being sortable into concrete themes. A character like 用 or 事 belongs neither to nature nor to the body: it shows up everywhere, and that is exactly what makes it frequent.
At five a day, around five weeks to see them all once. But reviewing what you have already seen takes more time than studying the new, and it is worth budgeting for from the start.
Another 367, bringing the cumulative total to 612. That is the level where characters start carrying abstract meanings and appearing in words you cannot guess from their parts.