In the main chapter, we look into the characteristics of the Japanese language through everyday phrases like this, which can often be seen on social media.

What kind of language is Japanese? We wanted to create a book that gives a thorough explanation for people who are not familiar with the language.

The book was co-written by university language researchers (PhD holders) who study the languages of the world, who specialize in topics such as what are the common characteristics among languages and what are their ‘individual characteristics’ (it is a field of Linguistics called Linguistic Typology). It was essential for the book to be written by researchers studying the Japanese language as one of many languages in the world, instead of Japanese language specialists.

We also asked Japanese language teachers with a long history of teaching English speakers, to write about different learning methods. The book is filled with rich information on the ways of studying Japanese by making use of internet resources, a new approach towards studying Japanese in this digital era, and the Japanese input on keyboard and smartphone, together with many useful website links.

If you happen to come in contact with the Japanese culture and become interested in the Japanese language too, we recommend you read this book. You can get to know about the characteristics, history and evolution, writing and sounds, and even the internet slang of Japanese. This book should be interesting, even if you do not intend to study Japanese.

This book is available in English and Japanese. It is an interesting book which gives a fresh perspective for native speakers as well. Those of you with advanced language skills, challenge yourself to read it in Japanese too.

👉　Please note that images may not correctly align with the sentence because some images are shown in Japanese.

👉　Japanese is used in some parts. In most cases, the image will be correctly displayed, but it may have visualizing problems if you are using a hardware which is not compatible with Japanese characters. In such cases, please install a Japanese font to try to see if it can be correctly displayed. Below are some free Japanese fonts which have high readability rates.

Jibun no Nihongo is neither a textbook nor a workbook.
We refer to it as “the infrastructure for learning Japanese.”
Use it just like you would water or electricity—for all kinds of applications.

Various studies estimate that the average adult native speaker of Japanese has a vocabulary of around 30,000 words.

This book, Finding My Japanese, comes with an extensive set of digital Japanese language data. It includes 32,000 words, approximately 2,000 phrases, 1,300 sentence patterns, and 1,500 fixed expressions. It also covers around 3,000 kanji characters. By comparison, the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test requires knowledge of up to 2,000 kanji, and in reality, even native Japanese speakers can confidently write only a little over 1,000 characters.

In other words, this list covers almost the entire range of expressions used by contemporary native speakers of Japanese.

These data are provided in spreadsheet format.
In the 2020s, spreadsheets are freely available and can comfortably handle around 40,000 rows, even on an average computer or smartphone.

This is where AI comes in.
To make effective use of AI, structured language data like this is essential.
The integration of spreadsheets and AI has progressed rapidly.

For example, you can simply ask:
“Create a vocabulary list and sample conversations for a barbershop using commonly used words and sentence patterns,”
and the AI will generate them instantly.

The included My Japanese list is ideally suited for AI use:
each entry is tagged with four levels of usage frequency and five levels of learning difficulty.

In this book, you will learn everything from the basics of using spreadsheets
to advanced customization techniques that combine AI with Japanese language lists.

These lists are updated every year.
Obsolete or rarely used expressions are further reviewed, and on the reader-exclusive support website
you will find profession-specific and situation-based vocabulary lists,
bringing the total to approximately 50,000 entries.

Because the data are digital, you are free to delete, edit, and add entries—
fully customizing the material to suit your own learning goals.

From complete beginners to highly advanced learners,
this single volume provides all the data and practical knowledge needed
for Japanese learning in the years to come.

Use this book to create your own Japanese textbooks, dictionaries, and databases!