In the JLPT N5, other than the kanji part of the test, will the vocab, grammar, etc. have kanji in it or should I read only Japanese material without kanji to avoid doing any unnecessary study?

You should be focusing on getting good at Japanese and not worrying about the requirements to pass N5, which is all but meaningless. So yes, you should be reading as much Kanji filled material as is appropriate for your current vocabulary level.

At N5 you need to learn how to read about 100 kanji. I would reccomend getting used to them becsuse you may encounter a vocabulary word you don't know but understand through kanji. Kanji knowledge can help with words not written in kanji as well.
For example: まいつき
At your level, I think 毎 is the only kanji with まい as a reading. So what does 毎 mean? "Every", OK next. つき means moon, right? So it literally means, "every moon", which may lead you to "every month". (It would deffinitely help in elliminating the wrong answers.)

Good luck!

Fully agree with activeaero but to answer your question the answer is yes. There will be kanji compounds with kanji not on the requirements list. If you want to go for the N5 then incorporate whats on it into your study but don't limit yourself to it's contents.

activeaero Wrote:You should be focusing on getting good at Japanese and not worrying about the requirements to pass N5, which is all but meaningless.

Meaningless for whom? Maybe for someone with the same goals as you, but how can you presume to speak for anyone else?

@fLeet street: Why don't you have a look at the N5 practice test http://www.jflalc.org/?act=tpt&id=25 .

Anna B Wrote:Meaningless for whom? Maybe for someone with the same goals as you, but how can you presume to speak for anyone else?

Meaningless for anyone studying Japanese who wishes to get good at it. Having goals is great, having the JLPT N5 for a goal is great, but the vast majority of the Japanese you want to read, out in the real world of Japanese natives, is not test material. Instead of spending time reading material that best mimics that of a test I would spend time reading material that best mimics that of what a real Japanese person might be reading. I think this is especially true at the lower levels of the JLPT, where Kanji are missing for even the most basic of words, except the one's needed to answer the question. For example, I'm looking at an old N3 test booklet and it is still leaving words like　昨日 and 一番 in kana, which is rather ridiculous for any sort of reading practice.

You just don't get good at Kanji by reading sentences that purposefully leave out Kanji for words you should easily know.

That's just my opinion at least.

This is just my opinion but, it always seemed to me that learning words in ひらがな in N5/N4 that were going to have kanji in N2/N1 was just stupid. I learned to read all the vocabulary in their natrual form. Even when I had just 300 kanji down, back when I was counting, I just wrote in lang-8 and looked up words that I didn't know. (Sometimes but rarely they were words I knew but didn't know the kanji for.) The first words/kanji I learned were, "添削"　"訂正"　"日記" etc. I feel like I learned 200-300 kani that way. (Though I couldn't write half of them)　

Anyways, good luck!