As someone on the outside looking in, its difficult to gauge the JLPT material. This question is aimed specifically for those of you who have taken the JLPT 1 and/or JLPT 2 or are at a Japanese reading level that is equivalent.

From a reader's perspective, what are the JLPT Level equivalents in English?
I've listed a few examples to give you an idea of what I think they might be. Correct me if necessary and provide me with examples for all 5 levels if possible.


This is just an example of the simplest English I could think of.
JLPT N5 = 'Green Eggs and Ham' by Dr. Seuss
I do not like them in a box.
I do not like them with a fox.
I do not like them in a house.
I do not like them with a mouse.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them, Sam I am.

[EDIT]
Instead of the Shakespeare example which follows, I'll use:
JLPT N1? = 'Harry Potter and The Philosophers' Stone" by J.K. Rowling.
The Boy who lived.
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.
Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.
[EDIT]

Though its old English, this is an example of high school reading.
JLPT N1? = 'Julius Caesar' by William Shakespeare
Antony : Act 3, Scene 2
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest--
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men--
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.

Nietzsche's works are an example of some of the most daunting reading I've ever done.
JLPT N1? = 'The Birth of Tragedy' by Fredrick Nietzsche translated by Walter Kauffmann
Even under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which songs of all primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness. In the German Middle Ages, too, singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, whirled themselves from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse. [...] There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from "folk-diseases," with contempt or pity born of consciousness of their own "healthy-mindedness." But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called "healthy-mindedness" looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them.

I plan to employ the Japanese language primarily through reading and writing, as I expect I will have little opportunity to speak it myself. I would like to use the JLPT in the future to gauge my progress. However, I also plan to use the vocabulary lists as a guide to learn from now. Knowing the English equivalents can help me better understand exactly how advanced the JLPT 1 is and where the other levels also fall.

I don't think English should be assessed through any of Shakespeare's work. As it uses old English that isn't used today. Unless JLPT uses Old Japanese. I'd say just hand them a Harry Potter book. Because at least then you can be graded on your ability to understand words that you've never seen before. Such as the 'latin' names for the spells. Or other words.

I imagine that Shakespeare probably falls outside the tiers of something like JLPT--reminds me of my trip to a bunraku performance in Osaka, both the spoken and written dialogue had anachronisms (retired kanji/kana, etc) that don't really affect one's general Japanese literacy, and likely isn't tested at the upper levels.

...I can't find it in any references, at least.

Off-topic, a linguistic pet peeve of mine: the language that Shakespeare wrote in is called Early Modern English, not Old English. Beowulf is in Old English.

lol, my teacher explained it to me that it's an old form of english so I just refer it as old

Shakespeare wrote in old English, but not Old English.

In light of the comments, I inserted an example from Harry Potter. I originally considered using Harry Potter as an example, but because it is generally considered to be a young adult's novel I assumed it wouldn't be equivalent to a JLPT N1. However if I'm wrong , please let me know.

The JLPT 1 reading is more like the New York Times.

It's harder than Harry Potter, but waaaaaaaay easier than Nietzsche.

N1 is just regular newspaper articles, nothing fancy like Shakespeare or Nietzsche. :/

Shakespeare's writing was stylised.. that wasn't how people spoke back then either. He wrote like that to add dramatic effect. That'd still be like asking someone on JLPT to read an old Japanese text as if it was somewhat relevant in today's language.

I'd rate the Harry Potter books as around N2 (mainly based on the number of kanji you need to know and complexity of grammar) and then as other people have said N1 would be more like serious magazine articles or maybe literature aimed at adults, but not too stylized.

However, that isn't to say that someone passing that level could read those books and understand everthing. Maybe you could very roughly assume their % score to reflect the % of it they could understand with no dictionary assistance.

The news or essays/academic papers are N1, I'd say. You see a lot of stiff grammar and expressions that you wouldn't encounter in most creative writing. Maybe Wikipedia could be a good source.