Are you studying Japanese? OH BOY, do we have a great tool for you! Our optimized and beautiful immersion-focused vocabulary deck will kickstart your Japanese comprehension and get you understanding native Japanese speakers in no time.
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Buy Now for $29.99At Refold, we're focused on getting you to understand REAL Japanese — the kind spoken in anime, dramas, and everyday conversation. And the biggest barrier standing between you and that goal is vocabulary.
This hand-crafted deck gets you to comprehension quickly by focusing on words that actually show up in the real world. We analyzed 16 slice-of-life anime series and cross-referenced the results against thousands of Japanese dramas to build a word list that holds up across media genres.
Japanese has no pool of English cognates to give you a free head-start — but it does have a large set of katakana loanwords (アイスクリーム, テレビ, バス...) that you will recognize almost instantly, so we cut those out. What we kept IN is just as deliberate: unlike our European decks, this deck includes more of the high-frequency function words, because in Japanese those little grammar words cannot be picked up for free and genuinely need dedicated study.
Japanese is uniquely challenging because vocabulary and kanji are inseparable. Rather than drilling radicals and words as separate activities, this deck trains your brain to recognize kanji the way you recognize a human face — through pattern exposure, not memorization rules. By the end, you'll understand more than 1,000 words and recognize ~700 unique kanji.
Over 90% of the example sentences introduce exactly one new word at a time. That means each card is as easy to process as possible — one unknown, every time. For the fastest results, combine the deck with regular Japanese immersion and check out our complete immersion learning guide.
Learning Japanese vocabulary has never been easier than with the JP1K Vocabulary Deck.
The hardest part of learning a language is basic comprehension. Once you can understand enough to have fun, you'll never want to stop.
Learn what Japanese is supposed to sound like with high-quality audio recorded by a native Japanese speaker.
Reinforce what you learn with concrete high-resolution visuals.
Learn words in context with real example sentences, handwritten by Japanese teachers and sorted by difficulty to optimize your learning.
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Your purchase comes with a 30-day, no questions asked, money-back guarantee. If you aren't completely satisfied with the deck, simply send our support team an email within 30 days.
There are no strings attached, no hoops to jump through, and nothing to prove. Simply tell us that you would like a refund and our support team will issue your refund on the spot, no questions asked.
High-quality Images: Now, as you go through the deck, you can use clear, high-resolution pictures to help you remember what you’re learning.
Better card order: Our data wizards worked their magic to improve the card order in the deck! Now the sequence of cards is even better at building on words and concepts you have already learned.
Brand new design: The JP1K has received a complete makeover! Now the deck is as beautiful as it is functional.
User-friendly customization: Want the deck to match your personal aesthetic? We made it easier than ever to change the text size and color.
Yes! It’s a bit complicated so we created a tutorial video for you. Watch the tutorial here.
Yep! It just takes time, energy, and effort. The Japanese deck took our team of data scientists, high-level Japanese learners, and Japanese natives about 250 hours to create. We’ve done the hard work so you don’t have to.
If it’s your first time studying a language, then you probably should.
Duolingo is a language-learning video game. It’s a great way to try out a language to see if you like it and to build a daily habit of engaging with the language.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t get you very far, and definitely won’t help you understand Japanese.
Yep! But they have a few problems:
They aren’t focused on helping you understand TV shows and casual conversation.
They don’t have native audio.
The words are not in an optimized order to make learning faster and easier.
The example sentences are crowdsourced and usually low quality.
NO! This just builds the initial foundation for understanding Japanese. Fluency comes after thousands of hours spent with the language.
Check out our Japanese quickstart guide for content recommendations.
Congrats 🥳! Head on over to our guide on sentence mining to learn how to make cards directly from your immersion.
We analyzed the frequency of words within 16 slice-of-life anime series and then only chose words that were common within a series AND across many series. We cross-referenced this list against a database of thousands of Japanese dramas to guarantee that the words were applicable across other media domains. A Japanese learner and Japanese native then reviewed the word list to manually filter out any words that didn’t seem useful.
You’ll learn about 700 kanji using this deck.
Yes, over 90% of the sentences in this deck are 1T. This means that for over 90% of the example sentences you will already know every word in the sentence, except for the new word you’re learning. This makes learning new words much faster and easier!
