Japanese Word Frequency

Word frequency is how often a word appears in real Japanese text and speech. The top 100 most frequent words cover about 50% of all spoken Japanese, so learning by frequency is the fastest path to comprehension. This tool lets you look up a word and see roughly where it sits on the frequency curve plus its JLPT level.

This is a curated 200-word list spanning JLPT N5 to N3 that approximates the rank order of the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ) for everyday vocabulary. Particles and copula sit at the top because they are required in virtually every sentence. We have not bundled the full BCCWJ corpus (10K+ entries) — that's planned for a future update.

Particles like は (wa), を (wo), の (no), に (ni), and が (ga) appear in nearly every Japanese sentence — sometimes multiple times. In a 100-word passage you will see the particle の appear 8–10 times on average. That makes them the highest-frequency lexical items in the language and the first vocabulary every JLPT N5 textbook teaches.

We capped this curated list at 200 entries weighted toward N5 and N4, which is where the practical impact for early learners is highest. Many N3 and most N2 / N1 words sit in the 500–10,000 range of the full frequency curve — common in news and literature but rarer in daily conversation. If a word you searched for isn't here, that usually means it is more topical than frequent.

Yes — copy the full top-200 table from below into a spreadsheet or text editor. You can also paste any Japanese text into our Vocabulary Extractor tool to get a frequency-sorted vocab list specifically for that source. For Anki users, both lists copy cleanly into card fields.

The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese is a 100-million-word annotated corpus maintained by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL). It is the standard reference for Japanese word frequency research and is the basis for most published frequency dictionaries. The full corpus is free for researchers and contains both books and online sources.