What are some essential Japanese vocabulary words for everyday use

Essential Japanese vocabulary words for everyday use include basic greetings, common nouns, verbs, adjectives, and expressions frequently used in daily conversations. Some of the core categories and examples are:

Basic Greetings and Expressions

• こんにちは (Konnichiwa) – Hello / Good afternoon
• ありがとう (Arigatou) – Thank you
• すみません (Sumimasen) – Excuse me / Sorry
• はい (Hai) – Yes
• いいえ (Iie) – No

Common Nouns

• 水 (Mizu) – Water
• 食べ物 (Tabemono) – Food
• 家 (Ie) – House
• 車 (Kuruma) – Car
• 本 (Hon) – Book

Basic Verbs

• 行く (Iku) – To go
• 来る (Kuru) – To come
• 見る (Miru) – To see/look/watch
• 食べる (Taberu) – To eat
• 話す (Hanasu) – To speak/talk

Common Adjectives

• 大きい (Ookii) – Big
• 小さい (Chiisai) – Small
• 新しい (Atarashii) – New
• 古い (Furui) – Old
• 良い (Yoi) – Good

These words form the foundation for everyday communication in Japanese and are essential for beginners to build basic understanding and conversational skills.

References

• Oxford Japanese mini dictionary

• A vocabulary of meaning of designed commercial artefacts based on naturally occurring language use

• Teaching Words in Context: Code-Switching Method for English and Japanese Vocabulary Acquisition Systems

• Beyond Film Subtitles: Is YouTube the Best Approximation of Spoken Vocabulary?

• Using confidence intervals to determine adequate item sample sizes for vocabulary tests: An essential but overlooked practice

• Applications and Analyzes of Artificial Intelligence in Enhancing English Vocabulary

• The Ultimate Japanese Phrasebook: 1800 Sentences for Everyday Use

• Developing a Vocabulary List for Tulu Speaking Children in the Age Range of 2-4 Years

• Essential, enjoyable and effective: The ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of powerful vocabulary instruction

• A Vocabulary and Linguistic Culture Phenomenon of Popular Songs in the 1930s: Focusing on Kim Hae-song’s song

• JSUT corpus: free large-scale Japanese speech corpus for end-to-end speech synthesis

• LIKARI (Five Words in A Day) Application to Improve Vocabulary Mastery in Japanese Language Learning

• Typology Lexical Verb ‘To Use’ in Japan: Natural Semantics Metalanguage Study

• The learner as lexicographer: using monolingual and bilingual corpora to deepen vocabulary knowledge

• Reading Tutor, A Reading Support System for Japanese Language Learners

• Japanese Lexical Complexity for Non-Native Readers: A New Dataset

• Creating a student-generated glossary in Moodle: How is it done and how effective is it?

• A Lexical-Pragmatic Approach to Japanese Wakamono Kotoba ‘Youth Language’ yabai

• Japanese linguistics, The Japanese language I

• Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions with Quantitative Meaning