Japanese game vocabulary by JLPT level

Scroll to the bottom of this page and look at the N1 table — the level the JLPT reserves for words like newspaper editorials use. In our data it contains 俺 (the rough first-person half of all game protagonists use), 所持 (the "items held" label), and 装備 (equip). These are among the most frequent words on any RPG screen.

A learner who studies from textbooks meets those words after years. A learner who plays meets them on day one, sees them hundreds of times, and knows them cold long before "N1" would suggest. The reverse is also true: classroom staples like 教室 survive in this list mostly because school-setting games exist at all.

The practical conclusion: if games are your input, use a list built from games. The N5 and N4 tables below are the highest-value study targets — they cover the dialogue in nearly every genre — and the N3 table is where interface Japanese lives.

Playto is a screen-translation overlay for playing games in another language. When a player looks a word up, saves it to their wordbook, or reviews it later, that interaction — with opt-in anonymous statistics enabled — becomes a signal that the word mattered on a real game screen.

Before anything is published here, the data passes through aggregation rules: a word must have been met in at least two different games and on at least two different user-days; only dictionary-verified words are counted, so names and misreads are excluded; and our own development playtime is removed entirely. The result is a cross-game aggregate — no individual player's word list, and no individual game's vocabulary, can be read out of it. The "games" column shows how many different games each word was met in. Details are in our privacy policy.

A frequency list is a map, not a method. If you want the method — which game to pick first, how to make the screen readable, and how to keep the words you meet — start with how to learn Japanese with video games.

If you want more material in this shape, the learn hub has themed word lists pulled from game screens, and the game difficulty breakdowns grade real screenshots of specific games by JLPT level, so you can check whether a game is above your level before committing thirty hours to it. Not sure which table is your frontier? The game Japanese quiz places you in about two minutes.

And if you want your own version of this list — the words you personally met, in the games you personally play — that is literally what Playto's wordbook is. Every word on this page got here because someone looked it up mid-game and decided it was worth keeping.

Learning English through games instead? The same dataset has an English side: English game vocabulary by CEFR level.