This meta dictionary adds JLPT-level tags to words in Yomichan.
JLPT data is sourced from Jonathan Waller‘s JLPT Resources page under the terms of the Creative Commons BY license. This is the same resource used by jisho, so the information found there should be roughly equivalent.
Alternative headword forms (e.g., variations of あかい: 赤い, 紅い, 朱い, 緋い, 赭い, 丹い) are sourced from The JMDict Project under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (V3.0).
Download jlpt.zip from the latest release and import it into Yomichan just like any other dictionary.
- Clone this repository
- Run the provided Python script within the project directory
- This will produce a zip file named jlpt.zip
- Import the zip file into Yomichan
As mentioned above, a large number of alternative headwords have been added to the base dataset provided by Jonathan Waller. This is useful because, for example, the word 取り引き is included as an N1 vocabulary word in the original data, but other common forms of the word (取引 and 取引き) are not.
The addition of these alternative forms means that some obscure spellings that would never appear on an exam might be tagged with an N5 label. For example, 歸る is tagged as N5 because it is an alternative form of 帰る. In these situations, the original spelling is displayed in parentheses inside the tag.
Some words have alternative forms that appear again on a higher-difficulty list. For example, あさって is N5 but its kanji form 明後日 is N1. Words such as this have been assigned two tags, so 明後日 will appear as "N5 (あさって), N1".
The lists used in this project were compiled by Jonathan Waller around 10 years ago, and I have made no attempt to curate them further. I can personally attest that more than one word from Waller's N1 list appeared in vocabulary section of the N2 exam in December 2021. Even though these lists shouldn't be considered comprehensive, I think they are still useful for identifying words that you can expect to see on the exam.
| N5 | N4 | N3 | N2 | N1 | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unique New Words | 667 | 630 | 1649 | 1731 | 3065 | 7742 |
Uniqueness is defined by a word's JMDict "seq" number, so 取り引き, 取引, and 取引き would be counted together as one unique word. Unique words that appear in multiple lists are not counted multiple times.
Users on the WaniKani forums have developed a similar solution using a custom-built version of JMDict for Yomichan.
In contrast, the yomichan-jlpt-vocab project is a stand-alone meta dictionary that can even be used without JMDict. This is useful for people who only want to use monolingual dictionaries or who want to build their own version of JMDict for Yomichan.