JLPT N4 Japanese Stories — Free Reading Practice

What is JLPT N4? Lower-intermediate Japanese

JLPT N4 is the second official level — the point where you stop translating sentence-by-sentence and start reading in chunks. It corresponds to roughly 300 hours of study, or two semesters.

The N4 grammar shift is bigger than people expect. You leave the polite-only ます-form world and enter casual speech (食べる instead of 食べます), the all-important て-form (食べて, 行って, 見て) and its dozens of grammar uses, conditionals (~たら, ~ば, ~なら), and the ability to chain verbs ("go and eat", "eat while reading").

N4 stories reflect that. They run 600 to 800 Japanese characters across 7–10 pages — almost twice the length of N5 stories. Sentences get longer, characters talk to each other (sometimes politely, sometimes casually), and the narratives start adding slight twists. Family, hobbies, work, school — everything you'd discuss at an intermediate language exchange.

Consejos de estudio para N4

1. Learn the te-form cold before you go deep on N4. Every other N4 grammar point builds on it (~ている, ~てから, ~てください, ~てもいい, ~てはいけない).
2. Track casual vs. polite speech. When a character switches from です/ます to plain form, that's social information about the relationship.
3. Sentence-mining beats flashcard cramming. Pick 5 sentences from each story, copy them out, and use those as your SRS items.
4. Read with the English visible for the first 2–3 stories. Then cover it and only peek when stuck. The covered-translation method builds reading speed.
5. Don't skip the descriptions of weather, food, or scenery. That vocabulary is exactly what shows up on the JLPT reading section.

Lectura N4 — preguntas frecuentes