Noticed nobody’s done a WaniKani vocab coverage list for a while (actually it’s been more than 7 years since someone’s done this) and in that time both WaniKani and the JPLT have added quite a few words. For anyone who’s managed to finish WaniKani (I certainly have a long way to go), here’s a list of words to study for the JPLT.
The wording of this seems to imply that a person taking the JLPT in 2017 would have been expected to know fewer words than someone taking it in 2024. I don’t think this is the case. Even if words that have never appeared before show up on future exams, those were presumably still possible candidates in past exams, but since there are no officially published lists, everyone just has to do their best to cover the ground they imagine could be on the exam.
(I’m not able to look at the link at the moment, so if this is discussed there, then ignore me)
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I just wanted to nitpick - some of the words in the spreadsheet are technically on Wanikani in kanji form, like 沢山 and アメリカ人 is low level on wanikani and technically doesn’t cover アメリカ, but I would hope that it doesn’t require that much more effort to worry about learning.
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Huh - that makes sense, I didn’t think of that. I just assumed that since more current lists of possible JPLT vocab are longer, they also added more to the test.
Yeah - this was done with a sorting algorithm. I could fix it, but that would probably require manually scrolling through over 4000 vocab words and making sure they weren’t covered (i’m lazy)
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I’m wondering what the source for that list may be - although I have seen various lists purporting to contain the kanji or vocabulary words that you need to learn by JLPT level, AFAIK there is currently no ‘official’ list of kanji or vocabulary words to study by JLPT level - evidently there was such a list at one time, but also evidently from the time of the 2010 JLPT update, no such updated list has been provided.
From:
https://www.jlpt.jp/e/faq/index.html
Why is “Test Content Specifications” no longer available after the 2010 revision of the JLPT?
We believe that the ultimate goal of studying Japanese is to use the language to communicate rather than simply memorizing vocabulary, kanji and grammar items. Based on this idea, the JLPT measures “language knowledge such as characters, vocabulary and grammar” as well as “competence to perform communicative tasks by using the language knowledge.” Therefore, we decided that publishing “Test Content Specifications” containing a list of vocabulary, kanji and grammar items was not necessarily appropriate. As information to replace “Summary of Linguistic Competence Required for Each Level” and “Composition of test items” are available. Please also refer to “Sample Questions.”
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There isn’t an official list, but people who take the test can compile lists of possible kanji and vocabulary (and other things) that might appear on the test based on their personal testing sessions. I got mine from Vocabulary Lists - Japanese Dictionary Tangorin.
Seeing as you only need to get 56% to pass, it’s not a huge issue that the list isn’t official (missing a few questions is okay as long as you pretty much know what you’re doing).
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OK, thanks for the clarification.