The most popular post on JapaneseWords.net has been 1000+ Japanese Words List. As the title suggests, the post contains a list of over 1000 common Japanese Words and Kanji. I am proud to announce that the list has just gotten much better.

Thanks to the hard work of Michele Romanini and his wife Bika Fujioka, the list is now available for download for Anki and Mnemosyne. In addition to making the list usable in Anki and Mnemosyne, he has also divided the original into multiple lists (english to hiragana, hiragana to English, English to Kanji, etc). The ability to use Anki will allow you to study over 1000 common words and kanji in a very efficient manner.

I have included two files below. One is in “mem” format (Mnemosyne format) and the other in txt format. Either one can be imported into Anki.

Japanese Word Lists

Click Here to download Mnemosyne format

Click Here to download txt format

Japanese Study Tip

When dealing with a list of this size it can be a little bit overwhelming. Setting up a study schedule and a goal will prove to be very helpful. For instance, you might try to learn 5 or 10 new words a day. Or choose the date of completion and then figure out the number of words you will need to remember each day!

Special Thanks

Thanks once again to Mr. Romanini and Mrs. Fujioka for their  hard work! Putting this list into a format usable by Anki and Mnemosyne greatly improves it’s value

A few days a go I made a post with some common Japanese words that you could use in situations for traveling and basic communication. Writing that post reminded me of a list of vocab/ kanji words I had put together a few years ago. After a little bit of searching I was able to find the list and have included it at the bottom of the post for anyone to download. It is a collection of words from the Japanese textbooks I had used when I was a study abroad student in Japan. The list contains nearly 1300 Japanese words with kanji, hiragana, and English readings.

The Japanese words on this list are in the order that they appeared in the text. The text books were generally in order of easier common words to more difficult words. However, the fact still remains they came from a text book and there will be words you should probably skip or at least put off to a later study date.  Since some of them will not be that important (for instance, if you are just learning Japanese then you probable don’t need to learn “Shinai” (bamboo sword) right away) I recommend that you go through the list and mark off uncommon and rarely used words.

Removing the rare and unused words will save you a lot of wasted time on learning Japanese words that you will never use. I have left the list complete, but most people will benefit by eliminating some of the words from their study. You can find a better explanation on learning Japanese words in this article on How to Learn Japanese Words.

To download the file, right click the below link and choose “save link as”or “save file as”.

Japanese words list

First 20 entries in the Japanese words list:

This was something I made a few years ago, so please don’t hesitate to contact me if you find any errors.