The 100 Most Common Japanese Words

Today I wanted to go over the 100 most common Japanese words and provide some explanations and example sentences for them.

The thing is, you have to learn a lot of words in order to comprehend the Japanese language. That being said, not all words are created equal. Some of them appear a lot more often than others in books, shows, and daily life.

So, one of the ways to learn a language quickly is to focus your attention on learning the highest frequency words first. That way you get the most bang for you buck when it comes to time spent studying and your ability to comprehend what you see and hear.

Where Do These Words Come From?

Frequency lists can be formed in many ways. I’ve seen lists that are based off of novels, lists that come from a wide variety of sources, and lists that had no explanation at all.

Fortunately no matter what the source was, the top hundred words were basically the same in each case. This makes a lot of sense when you think about it, since the differences would be more likely to appear towards the middle and end of the lists.

For today’s purposes I’ll be using the Japanese Wikipedia as my source. What they did was take all the words written on it and ran them through a program that found and organized words based on how often they appeared.

You can get the full list of words 1-10,000 on the Wiktionary:Frequency lists/Japanese page if you would like, but the one drawback with it is that they only provide the Japanese words.

There are no explanations or example sentences to help you understand them!

The 100 Most Common Japanese Words

Alright, before we jump into this list there are a couple of things I need to make clear.

The first is that I’m only going to provide one meaning for each word, even though some of them have multiple meanings depending on the context that they’re used in.

Furthermore, to make things easier to navigate, I’m going to be organizing these words into groups based on what part of speech they belong to (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.).

Finally, I’m only going to present them in their dictionary form during this part, but in the next section when I give example sentences, I may or may not inflect or conjugation them depending on the situation.

Alright, without further ado, here is the list of the top one hundred Japanese words!

1. Particles

Particle	Rōmaji	Meaning
の	no	indicates possessive
に	ni	in
は	wa	topic marker
を	o	indicates direct object of action
が	ga	indicates sentence subject
と	to	and
で	de	at
も	mo	also
から	kara	from
や	ya	such things as …
など	nado	et cetera
まで	made	up to
へ	e	indicates direction or goal
より	yori	than
か	ka	indicates a question
でも	demo	… or something

2. Adverbs

Adverb	Rōmaji	Meaning
又	mata	again
共に	tomoni	together

3. Pre-Noun Adjectivals

Pre-Noun Adjectival	Rōmaji	Meaning
この	kono	this
その	sono	that

4. Suffixes

Suffix	Rōmaji	Meaning
ぬ	nu	not
部	bu	department
機	ki	machine​
語	go	language
よう	you	appearing …
線	sen	line
号	gou	number
地	chi	place
社	sha	company
系	kei	system
中	chuu	during
戦	sen	battle

5. Conjunctions

Conjunction	Rōmaji	Meaning
しかし	shikashi	however

6. Verbs

Verb	Rōmaji	Meaning
する	suru	to do
だ	da	to be (Copula)
成る	naru	to become​
有る	aru	to exist
よる	yoru	to be due to
言う	iu	to say
行う	okonau	to carry out
出来る	dekiru	to be able to do
持つ	motsu	to have
おく	oku	to place
呼ぶ	yobu	to call
会う	au	to meet
受ける	ukeru	to receive
対する	taisuru	to compare with
つく	tsuku	to be attached
行く	iku	to go
見る	miru	to watch

7. Adjectives

Adjective	Rōmaji	Meaning
多い	ooi	numerous
無い	nai	nonexistent

8. Pronouns

Pronoun	Rōmaji	Meaning
これ	kore	this
それ	sore	that
彼	kare	he​

9. Adverbial/Temporal Nouns

Adverbial/Temporal Noun	Rōmaji	Meaning
現在	genzai	present time
その後	sonoato	after that
日	hi	day​
月	tsuki	month
場合	baai	case
当時	touji	at that time

10. Nouns

Noun	Rōmaji	Meaning
年	toshi	year
こと	koto	matter
日本	nihon	Japan
為	tame	purpose
人	hito	people
もの	mono	object
駅	eki	train station
国	kuni	country
大学	daigaku	university
後	ato	behind
放送	housou	broadcast
軍	gun	army
所	tokoro	place
名	na	name
回	kai	an instance
世界	sekai	the world
時代	jidai	era
東京	toukyou	Tokyo
会	e	picture
選手	senshuu	player
昭和	shouwa	Showa (name)
作品	sakuhin	work of art​
学校	gakkou	school
アメリカ	amerika	America
番組	bangumi	program (TV)
車	kuruma	car
川	kawa	river
映画	eiga	movie
位	kurai	amount
テレビ	terebi	television
研究	kenkyuu	research
町	machi	town
東	higashi	east
他	hoka	other
時	toki	time
使用	shiyou	use
存在	sonzai	existence
活動	katsudou	action
発売	hatsubai	sale

Example Sentences That Use These Words

Here are some example sentences that use words from the frequency list provided above. Please note that some of the verbs will be conjugated in order to have a more natural sounding sentence.

I won’t provide an example for every single word, since that would become very repetitive due to the interchangeability of many of these words.

That being said, if you do want an example sentence of every single word, I’ll provide you with a really good resource at the end of this post.

Also, if a non-top-100-word was used in any of the sentences below in order them make it work, I will explain the word afterwards so that you know it’s not in the top 100. You can then decide if you’d like to spend the time to learn it or not.

• 彼はテレビを見ています。
• kare wa terebi o miteimasu.
• He is watching TV.

Here is one example sentence where you could easily swap out words. For example, the word テレビ could be replaced with the word 映画 in order to say “He is watching a movie” instead.

• この町には人より車の方が多い。
• kono machi ni wa hito yori kuruma no hou ga ooi.
• There are more cars than there are people in this town.

[ejje.weblio.jp]

In this last example the new word 方 (hou) is part of a grammatical pattern that states one noun has more of an adjective than another. In this example, the cars have more numbers than the amount of people.

• その番組は今放送中です。
• sono bangumi wa ima housou chuu desu.
• That program is now in the middle of broadcasting

[context.reverso.net]

In the above example, we see a couple of things. One is the new word 今 (ima) for “now” and the other is the final word です (desu) which is a more polite form of the verb だ (da) from our list.

The verbs だ and です are called “copula” which simply means that they are a form of the verb “to be.” In Japanese, they are handled a little differently from how we use that verb in English, but for now there’s no need to worry about it.

• 日本からアメリカへ行きますか？
• nihon kara amerika e ikimasu ka?
• Are you going from Japan to America?

I’m only going to do one more example sentence since this section of the article is becoming a little too long.

• 東京には大学や学校などが有る。
• toukyou ni wa daigaku ya gakkou nado ga aru.
• There are universities and schools in Tokyo.

I find it a little interesting that 有る (aru) appears in its kanji form on the list of top 100 since I generally see it written in hiragana only as ある.

Does Studying Frequency Lists Really Work?

Out of the five example sentences written above, about thirty of the top 100 words were used. So as you can see, only knowing 100 words doesn’t actually get you very far into reading native materials.

In fact, if you’re a fan of Steve Kaufmann like me, and you watch his videos on YouTube, then you’ve probably heard him talk about whether or not using frequency lists to learn a new language makes that big of a difference.

He says that if you read and listen to a lot of native material, you will naturally encounter the highest frequency words without even trying. I think that makes a lot of sense, because by definition these are the words you’re going to run into the most.

Another point that he makes is that even if you learn the top 1,000 most used words, all it takes is one or two unknown words in a new sentence to throw you back to square one where you have to stop and look it up. Again, I’d have to agree with him as this has been my experience as well.

But I think that there are two situations where using a high frequency list actually does make a lot of sense from a language learner’s point of view.

The first one is if you’re in a hurry. Let’s say that you’re moving to Japan in six months and you want to be able to communicate as quickly as possible.

That’s a situation where spending your time on words that get used everyday by people is more valuable than spending it on random words that appear in a native book or show that you might study.

Another situation where it’s a good idea is when you’re using a flash card program (like Anki) to learn new words and review old ones.

If you have a frequency list that provides example sentences for each word, you can turn those sentences into cards which you can then later review.

Further Resources

I provided you with a free frequency list earlier in this post that pulled the words from the Japanese Wikipedia.

But when I used a frequency to learn the most common Japanese words myself, I actually used something different. I got a book off Amazon that contains the top 5,000 words in Japanese.

The one that I learned from got its words from a variety of sources, so it was a better representation of the Japanese language.

It also provided me with an example sentence for each word so that I was better able to understand how it’s used.

I spent the time to turn each sentence into a flash card and it really made a difference in how quickly I learned Japanese.

Here’s my full review of it.

The other thing you might have noticed is that a lot of the words from the particles list got used in the examples I provided above.

That’s not surprising considering how many particles exist and how often they show up in sentences.

In fact, getting a good understanding of how particles work and what their various meanings are helped me stop feeling frustrated and start feeling like I could actually learn this language.

There is one book I own that goes really deep into understanding particles, and it provides the best explanations I’ve ever seen.

Here’s a more detailed post on it.

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know by leaving them down below. Thanks for reading!