50 Common Japanese Words Every Beginner Should Know

Japanese is spoken by around 125 million people, primarily in Japan, and uses a writing system combining three distinct scripts — building early vocabulary alongside basic script recognition sets a stronger foundation than romaji alone.

Greetings and courtesy

こんにちは konnichiwa (hello), ありがとう arigatou (thank you), お願いします onegaishimasu (please), さようなら sayounara (goodbye, fairly formal), すみません sumimasen (excuse me/sorry) — essential opening phrases.

Numbers

一 ichi (one), 二 ni (two), 三 san (three) through 十 juu (ten) — worth noting Japanese has different counting word sets depending on what's being counted, a genuinely distinctive feature covered in more detail elsewhere.

Family

母 haha (my mother) / お母さん okaasan (someone else's mother, or addressing your own respectfully), 父 chichi / お父さん otousan (father, same pattern), 友達 tomodachi (friend) — note Japanese often uses different terms depending on whether you're referring to your own family or someone else's, a real feature of the language's politeness system.

Everyday life

水 mizu (water), 家 ie (house), 仕事 shigoto (work), 学校 gakkou (school).

Why three scripts, not one

Japanese combines hiragana (a phonetic script for native Japanese words and grammar), katakana (a phonetic script mainly for foreign loanwords), and kanji (characters borrowed from Chinese, carrying meaning). This is genuinely unusual among world languages and deserves early, deliberate attention rather than relying on romaji indefinitely.

A simple way to build from this list

1. Learn hiragana first — it's the foundational phonetic script most beginner material starts with.
2. Look up each new word in its proper script form, not just romaji.
3. Use each word in a short sentence of your own.
4. Review yesterday's words before adding today's.

Look up any Japanese word instantly, in proper script, offline, with English Japanese Dictionary →