How to remember Japanese vocabulary
Every Japanese word has a meaning, a reading and often kanji. How to learn all three together, and memory techniques that make words stick.
Learning a Japanese word means learning three things at once: what it means, how it’s read, and how it’s written, often in kanji. ご飯 is gohan, rice or a meal, written with the kanji 飯. Most words slip in one of those three places, usually the reading.
Learn hiragana alongside your first words
Hiragana is the set of 46 basic characters, each a sound like か (ka) or み (mi), that furigana are written in. You can learn it alongside your first vocabulary: each word you learn gives you more practice reading it. With daily practice, many learners read it comfortably within a few weeks.
Learn the reading with the word
When you meet a word written in kanji, learn its reading at the same time. Furigana, the small kana written over kanji, show you the reading right on the word, so you can read every card from your first day.
Use them as a support. Learners who lean on furigana for too long can end up reading the kana and skipping the kanji. Once a word feels familiar, try reading the kanji first, then check the furigana.
Learn words, then kanji
Most kanji have more than one reading, and which one is used depends on the word. 飯 is han in ご飯 and meshi on its own. Learning kanji inside real words gives you the right reading in context, and the most useful words first give you the most common kanji first.
Make each word memorable
A sound-alike hook
Find an English phrase that sounds like the word, and picture it with the meaning. 水 (mizu, water) sounds like “me, zoo”: picture yourself at the zoo, hosing down the elephants. That’s the keyword method, one of the best-studied memory tricks for foreign words (Atkinson & Raugh, 1975). See memory hooks.
Make it yours
Put the scene somewhere you know, with people or things from your own life. Things that relate to you are among the easiest to recall (Symons & Johnson, 1997), and that holds for new words in a foreign language too (Pruss et al., 2025).
Same sound, same place
Japanese sounds come in rows: ま, み, む, め, も all start with “m”. Give each row a place you know, and let every word that starts with that row happen there. The place becomes a clue to how the word starts. See memory palaces for the idea behind it.
Meet words again in sentences
A word you’ve met in a few real sentences is easier to use. Once you know enough words, read sentences where only one word is new, so the rest carries the meaning. See sentence cards. Many learners also “mine” words from what they read and watch, with tools like Yomitan and asbplayer: see sentence mining.
Keep them with spaced reviews
Test yourself on each word just before you’d forget it, at gaps that grow from days to months. It’s the best-supported way to keep thousands of words (Cepeda et al., 2006). See how spaced repetition works.
How Flashfriend does it
Flashfriend starts you on the most useful Japanese words, with furigana over the kanji on every word card and audio for how it sounds. You pick a place for the word’s kana row and a scene from a phrase that sounds like it, and Flashfriend paints the picture: 水 gets you at the zoo with a hose. Once you know enough words, sentences with one new word follow, grammar arrives one pattern at a time, and you’re tested on each word just before you’d forget it, with a longer gap each time you remember it.
With Pro, Yomitan and asbplayer send words straight into Flashfriend as you read and watch. Read more about Flashfriend for Japanese.
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