Essential JLPT N5 Vocabulary: 80 Words Every Beginner Needs

If you're starting Japanese, N5 vocabulary is where everything begins. The full N5 list runs to roughly 800 words, but a core of high-frequency words does the heavy lifting in almost every beginner sentence. Here are 80 essential ones, grouped so they're easy to absorb.

Readings are shown in hiragana. Learn these in real sentences, not as a flat list — see the note at the end on making them stick.

People and pronouns

Everyday nouns

Food and drink

Common verbs

Common adjectives

Time and numbers

Places and directions

How to make these actually stick

A list is a starting point, not a study method. Reading down a table feels productive but almost none of it survives to next week. Three things turn these words into knowledge you keep:

1. See them in real sentences with audio. Isolated words are hard to remember and easy to misuse. Context and pronunciation do most of the work.
2. Review on a spaced schedule. Revisit each word right before you'd forget it. That's what spaced repetition automates.
3. Practice recall, not just recognition. Produce the word from the meaning — see recognition vs recall.

Cotobara does all three automatically for the full N5 corpus (and every level above it): native audio, example sentences, and a recall-first spaced-repetition engine — so you're not just reading a list, you're keeping it. When you're ready for the bigger picture, see how many words you need for each JLPT level.

Start Cotobara for free — learn the full N5 list in context, with audio, and actually remember it.