Joyo Grade 5 kanji
185 kanji - the full Grade 5 set from the Ministry of Education's Joyo list.
Readings get less obvious and compound words denser in Grade 5, which covers politics, economy, biology, and the academic vocabulary children encounter in the second-to-last year of elementary school.
Grade 5 is where the syllabus turns toward subject-specific vocabulary that a literate adult needs. The basic kanji of economics arrive - money, finance, trade - alongside biology terms like organ and cell, politics terms like party and vote, and physics terms like energy and force. The characters are individually less common in casual reading than the Grade 3 and 4 sets, but they appear so densely in news and academic prose that not knowing them is a significant gap. This is also the level where the historical layer of kanji becomes more visible; many Grade 5 characters retain older readings that show up in fixed phrases, idioms, and literary writing. Learners often find Grade 5 the most demanding of the elementary grades because it asks for both recognition and contextual interpretation.
WaniKani coverage
All of Grade 5 is taught on WaniKani, with most of the kanji at Guru I or higher by around level 38.
To see exactly which of the 185 Grade 5 kanji you have already learned, head to the Joyo coverage tool - it ties your live WaniKani SRS progress to the lists on this site and breaks down coverage by grade.
All 185 Grade 5 kanji
See your personal coverage
The grid above is the same for every visitor. To see how many of the 185 Grade 5 kanji you have personally learned, open the Joyo coverage tool and paste a WaniKani personal access token. Your token stays in your browser; nothing is stored on a server.