N1 Kanji

What the N1 kanji set covers

N1 covers effectively the full set of general-use characters plus a tail of rarer ones from literary, legal and academic writing. Many appear only a handful of times outside specialist texts.

How to study them

Coverage at this level comes from volume of reading rather than from lists. Candidates who clear N1 have usually read a great deal of formal Japanese, not memorised two thousand cards.

The thing that costs marks

The long tail has diminishing returns. Recognising the top thousand instantly matters more for your score than half-recognising two thousand, because reading speed is the binding constraint on the N1 paper.

Meanings shown above are the primary sense of each character. Individual kanji often carry several senses, and the full list for any character is available by selecting it.