In a previous post, I expounded on language learning and laid out what I think is the fastest way to learn any language. One of the components of quickly acquiring languages is to prioritize the words that you learn. Learning the most common words first will reap huge benefits for your comprehension. There are several word frequency lists out there, most of them I found were compiled from newspapers, but Mike “Pomax” Kamermans over at nihongoresources.com had a brilliant idea to use Japanese novels as material instead. His algorithm compiled over 65 million words. No word frequency list can be perfect, but I think this one is about as close as you can get.
I simply took the first 3000 words from his data and made some tweaks so the words are easier to utilize for studying. I removed punctuation and numbers, and compiled the words into 2 page pdf files that are easy to print so you can cross off words when you learn them. I’ve also included the text file of those 3000 words in case you want to do any textual searches.
PDF files: For Printing
Japanese Word Frequency List 1-1000
Japanese Word Frequency List 1000-2000
Japanese Word Frequency List 2000-3000
Text file: For Searching
Japanese Word Frequency List 1-3000
A little bit of number crunching on the data turned out some very interesting facts.
The first 100 words on the list make up 57.2% of the text that was processed.
The first 500? 70.3%.
The first 1000? 76.2%
The first 3000? 85.4%
The first 10,000? 94.1%
But don’t let this data fool you completely. Mike (the man who generated the list himself) said in an email…
Usually the most frequently used words don’t need explicit learning because they are found all over the place, and the medium-presence words are more important, because they convey important things. Frequent words are usually common because they contain little information, so you have a trade-off between ‘used a lot’ and ‘give critical information’.
You can find the complete list of more than 65,000 words including punctuation, word frequency, and parts of speech at http://pomax.nihongoresources.com/index.php?entry=1222520260.
Here’s a link my article How to Learn Any Language in 6 Months
If only your list of the top 1000 had what each word meant.
John, I would recommend going to http://dic.yahoo.co.jp and find the meanings and an example sentence or two for each word. I think the words need to be learned in context too, not just translated blindly. Thanks for the comment!
[...] A typical unabridged Chinese character dictionary will have more than 40,000 independent entries. It would take a lifetime to familiarize yourself with all of these characters, but thankfully languages follow the rule of 80/20, a.k.a. the Pareto Principle. What this means is roughly 20% of those characters are used 80% of the time. A well-educated Chinese student will recognize upwards of 7,000 characters, and reading a newspaper may require a working knowledge of 3,000 characters [1]. We can find the same thing in English- “The Reading Teachers Book of Lists claims that the first 25 words make up about one-third of all printed material in English, and that the first 100 make up about one-half of all written material [2].” Using an SRS like Anki and a dictionary with good example sentences, the initial effort of memorizing 100 words should take three days at most. Three days for 50% comprehension! I know I know, that number is slightly overstated because many of those 100 words are lemmas (more than one word – like “is” can be “He was”, “I am”, “You are” etc.), but you see the point I’m trying to make right? By learning the common words first, you quickly increase your effective comprehension of the language. Note: You can find the first 3000 common Japanese words in this post. [...]
This would have been absolutely amazing, if it had included translations. Telling people who can’t read kanji to search for it in an online dictionary is laughable.
Right now I’m using this amazing resource to learn new 日本語 vocab (I already finished RTK 一+三):
http://www.manythings.org/japanese/words/leeds/
What I do is:
1. Click on the [E] link for each new word I want to learn, which takes you to Jim Breen’s E-dic.
2. Read the definition and check out some examples.
3. From those examples I extract 5 for further review in my Anki deck.
I´m also using Khatzumoto’s MCD method for my reviews; which is much more effective and easier to use than vanilla-sentences ever were.
Wow, that site is awesome! It makes it really easy to find meanings and such, thanks for the tip.
CJ, you don’t need translations. You can simply copy and paste into the dictionary. It helps, but is not necessary, to read kanji for the application of this list–indeed, for most it is by this list that you can learn to read kanji.
I’ve employed it for the past several months and have gotten almost up to 2000 words so far. I simply paste into the Denshi Jisho online dictionary, take a couple of sentences whose words I otherwise know, and put them into my SRS.
Thanks for the information, John!
Thanks for the reply Curt. But unfortunately putting most of these words through an online dictionary brings up long lists of very different words. I doubt anyone is going to guess the meaning if they didn’t know the word before searching.