Credits

Tokiwa Labo Japanese is built on the work of many people. Thank you.

Word and kanji lists

The JLPT hasn't published official word or grammar lists since 2010, so we built our lists for N5, N4 and N3 by comparing several sources, then made the final choices ourselves.

• JLPT level data is partly based on JLPT Resources by Jonathan Waller (tanos.co.uk), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). We selected, re-levelled and edited the lists. [verify licence version and link]

• Dictionary data: this app uses the JMdict and KANJIDIC2 dictionary files. These files are the property of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, and are used in conformance with the Group's licence. Word readings, kanji spellings, kanji readings and parts of speech in the app were taken from or checked against these files. That data, including our changes to it, is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

• Word frequency: when sources disagreed about a word's level, we used word frequencies from wordfreq by Robyn Speer, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, as a tie-breaker. No wordfreq data is included in the app.

• Kanji readings were also checked against the Japanese government's official list of common-use kanji (常用漢字表).

• Other lists we compared: to decide which level a word, kanji or grammar point belongs to, we also checked which items appear on the pre-2010 official JLPT lists and old test papers, Bunpro, JLPT Sensei, にほんご Study, 日本語NET, Langoal, Nihongo-Pro, MLC, and the contents of published JLPT study books (TRY! 日本語能力試験, 新完全マスター文法, 日本語総まとめ). We used only the fact that an item appears on each list; we didn't copy their definitions, explanations or example sentences.

Study content and audio

Example sentences, grammar lessons, drills, practice questions and explanations were drafted with AI (Anthropic's Claude) and reviewed and edited by us before being published. Audio was generated with ElevenLabs.

About the JLPT

The Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) is run by the Japan Foundation and Japan Educational Exchanges and Services (JEES). Tokiwa Labo Japanese is independent and isn't affiliated with or endorsed by them. Our practice questions are our own, written to follow the test's published formats.

Open-source software

The app is built with open-source software including Next.js, React and ts-fsrs. [verify list, or link to a generated licence list]