Twelve weeks is enough for N5 if you use them properly. This plan assumes 8 to 10 hours a week from a genuine standing start — no prior Japanese — which lands you around 100 to 120 hours by exam day.
That is at the lower end of the commonly-cited 150–250 hour range for N5, and it works because N5 is a narrow syllabus and because this plan front-loads the two things that otherwise sabotage beginners: kana, and listening.
What N5 actually asks of you
Before planning, know the target. N5 is 90 minutes across three sittings:
| Section | Time | What it tests |
|---|---|---|
| Language Knowledge (Vocabulary) | 20 min | Kanji readings, orthography, word choice, paraphrase |
| Language Knowledge (Grammar) · Reading | 40 min | Sentence grammar, sentence building, short passages |
| Listening | 30 min | Task and point comprehension, quick verbal responses |
Scoring is out of 180. You need 80 to pass, plus at least 38/120 in Language Knowledge · Reading and 19/60 in Listening. That listening minimum is not negotiable and is the reason this plan starts listening in week 2 rather than week 9.
Rough content targets: ~100 kanji, ~800 vocabulary items, and the core grammar of a first-year course. Those are community estimates rather than an official list.
The plan
Weeks 1–2: Kana, and nothing else matters
Goal: read hiragana and katakana without hesitating.
This is the single highest-return fortnight in the whole plan. Everything afterwards is slower and more painful if your kana are shaky, and most people who stall at N5 stalled here.
- Week 1 — hiragana. Ten new characters a day, reviewed daily. Write them by hand; the motor memory is real. By day 7 you should read all 46 plus dakuten (が, ざ, だ, ば), handakuten (ぱ) and combinations (きゃ, しゅ, ちょ).
- Week 2 — katakana. Same pace. Katakana feels harder because it appears less often in beginner material, so read loanwords deliberately: メニュー, コーヒー, テレビ, パソコン, コンビニ.
Two traps: the small っ (double consonant) and the small ゃゅょ. Both change meaning, both appear constantly in N5 reading questions, and both are the difference between びょういん (hospital) and びよういん (hair salon).
Drop romaji completely by the end of week 2. It will feel slow. Do it anyway.
Weeks 3–5: Core grammar and your first 300 words
Goal: build and understand basic sentences.
Grammar to cover:
- です / ではありません, past and non-past
- Particles: は, が, を, に, で, へ, と, も, から, まで
- Verb groups and the ます-form
- い-adjectives and な-adjectives, including negatives and past
- Existence: あります / います
- Counters: 一つ, 一人, 一枚, 一本, 一冊
- Question words: 何, どこ, いつ, だれ, どう, いくら
Vocabulary: 100 words a week, using spaced repetition. Learn words in sentences, not in isolation — 高い on its own is a word, 「このかばんは高いです」is usable Japanese.
Start listening in week 2 or 3. Fifteen minutes a day of beginner Japanese audio. You will not understand much at first; that is not the point. You are training your ear to segment the stream into words, and that takes calendar time, not effort.
Weeks 6–8: Te-form, past tense, and the first kanji
Goal: connect sentences, and start reading kanji.
The te-form is the hinge of Japanese grammar and the point where N5 gets real:
- て-form conjugation for all three verb groups
- 〜てください (requests)
- 〜ています (ongoing action and resulting state)
- 〜てもいいです / 〜てはいけません (permission and prohibition)
- た-form and plain past
- 〜たことがあります (experience)
- 〜たり〜たりします (listing actions)
Kanji from week 6. Roughly 15 a week for the rest of the plan gets you to 100. Start with the ones that appear everywhere:
日 月 火 水 木 金 土 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九 十 人 大 小 中 上 下 本 年 時 分 今 私 何
Learn each one as reading + word, not as an isolated shape. 日 is not “sun” — it is にち in 日曜日, ひ in 日, and か in 三日. The readings are what the exam tests.
Weeks 9–10: Consolidation and reading
Goal: use what you have, at speed.
- Comparisons: 〜より, 〜のほうが, いちばん
- Wanting: 〜たいです, 〜がほしいです
- Invitations: 〜ましょう, 〜ませんか
- Reasons: 〜から, 〜ので
- Adjective and verb modification: 高い本, 買った本
Read short passages daily. Graded readers at level 0, NHK Easy News with a dictionary, or the reading questions from practice papers. Read without looking up every word — inferring from context is a skill the exam tests directly.
Increase listening to 25 minutes a day.
Weeks 11–12: Exam conditions
Goal: turn knowledge into marks.
This is where many plans go wrong: people keep learning new material until the last day. Stop. The final fortnight is for converting what you know into exam performance.
- Sit a full timed mock test at the start of week 11, cold. Our free N5 practice test takes 20 minutes and explains every answer.
- Work through every explanation, including the questions you got right. Half the value is confirming you were right for the right reason rather than by elimination.
- Drill your weakest section. The per-section breakdown tells you where your marks are.
- Practise pacing. 20 minutes for the vocabulary section means roughly 40 seconds a question. If you are running out of time, you need to answer faster, not know more.
- Second mock in week 12, then stop. The final two days are for sleep and logistics.
If you fall behind
You will, at some point. Here is the triage order.
Never sacrifice kana or listening. Kana is the foundation; listening is the section with the minimum you are most likely to miss.
Kanji is the most compressible. If you arrive at week 11 with 60 kanji instead of 100, you can still pass — the vocabulary section is only part of a shared 120-point band at N5.
Cut vocabulary breadth before grammar depth. A grammar pattern you half-know produces wrong answers across reading, grammar and listening. A word you never learned costs you one question.
Weekly template
A shape that works for 8–10 hours:
| Mon–Fri (1h 15m/day) | Weekend (1h 30m/day) | |
|---|---|---|
| Review | 15 min spaced repetition | 20 min spaced repetition |
| New material | 30 min grammar or kanji | 40 min, catch up on the week |
| Listening | 15 min audio | 20 min audio |
| Output/reading | 15 min reading or writing | 30 min practice questions |
Daily beats intensive. Ninety minutes a day for six days will outperform nine hours on a Sunday, because spaced repetition and listening both depend on repeated exposure across time.
What not to do
- Do not learn kanji by shape alone. The exam tests readings in context.
- Do not postpone listening. It is the slowest skill to build and the one with a hard floor.
- Do not study exclusively with an app. Apps are excellent for vocabulary retention and poor at grammar explanation and reading stamina.
- Do not skip writing by hand in the first fortnight. You do not need it long-term, but it fixes kana faster than anything else.
- Do not sit your first mock test the week before the exam. Find out where you stand while you still have time to act on it.
Next steps
- Take the free JLPT N5 practice test
- What the JLPT N5 covers — sections, timing and pass mark
- JLPT scoring explained — the sectional minimum that fails people
Study-hour, kanji and vocabulary figures in this article are widely-used community estimates. The JLPT has not published an official content specification since the 2010 revision.