JLPT N5 kanji list
79 kanji - the full N5 character set as reconstructed from the pre-2010 official syllabus.
The Japanese-Language Proficiency Test starts at N5. A learner who passes can read simple sentences written in hiragana, katakana, and a foundational set of kanji - the reading floor everything else builds on.
The N5 kanji are the survival vocabulary every textbook leads with. Numbers one through ten are here, and so are the days of the week, the four basic directions, verbs as common as go and eat, and the nouns you cannot get through a day in Japan without: water, fire, person, sun, money. Knowing these characters gets you through store signs, train station names, restaurant menus, and the bulk of beginner textbook prose. N5 is also where most learners first meet the radical-and-component structure of kanji, so the list weights heavily toward characters whose parts reappear in dozens of higher-level kanji. The list itself is community-maintained: the JLPT stopped publishing the official kanji syllabus after the 2010 redesign, but the reconstruction below has been stable across study tools for over a decade.
WaniKani coverage
Every N5 kanji is on WaniKani, and 99% of the set has been taught by the end of level 10. The last one shows up at level 16. Bear in mind that meeting a kanji in a lesson is not the same as knowing it: each one needs four correct reviews over roughly three and a half days before it counts as learned.
Want to see exactly which of these you have already learned? The JLPT coverage tool ties your live WaniKani progress to the lists on this site, with per-level percentages and the missing characters highlighted.