Learn Japanese with Kiki's Delivery Service
We analyzed every line of Kiki's Delivery Service. It uses 907 unique words. The right 244 of them cover 70% of everything said, and this page shows the path to them.
- 907unique words
- 244words to 70%
- 627words to 90%
- 1,248lines analyzed
Why Kiki's Delivery Service works as a destination
Kiki is the film Japanese-learning communities most often recommend watching first, and the vocabulary data backs the folklore: errands, shops, customers, weather, a town. It is the Japanese you would use in Japan, spoken clearly.
Kiki works: she takes orders and apologizes for delays, so you hear polite service Japanese and casual teenage Japanese side by side. That register switch is hard to hear anywhere else.
魔女の宅急便: the title in Japanese
Kiki's Delivery Service is 魔女の宅急便 (Majo no Takkyūbin): “The witch's express home delivery”.
魔女 (majo) is witch: 魔 (sorcery) + 女 (woman).
宅急便 (takkyūbin) is a door-to-door courier service. An everyday modern word next to “witch” is the title's joke. It unpacks as 宅 (home) + 急 (express) + 便 (delivery).
The first words it teaches you
Katarineko teaches a film's vocabulary in the order the film introduces it, so your first words come from its first scenes. These are the opening entries of the Kiki's Delivery Service curriculum, with how often you'll hear each across the film:
| Word | Reading | Times heard |
|---|---|---|
| 天気予報 | てんきよほう | 3 |
| よる | よる | 5 |
| 天気 | てんき | 3 |
| 風 | かぜ | 6 |
| 晴れる | はれる | 4 |
| つぎ | つぎ | 3 |
| ジジ | じじ | 32 |
| 今夜 | こんや | 6 |
How far the words take you
The curve is steep at the start: a film reuses its own vocabulary constantly, so the early words carry a lot of dialogue. Understanding 70% of the words is still short of enjoying the film. It is the point where following along stops being decoding and starts being watching, and it is the threshold we aim you at first.
How Katarineko turns this into a path
You answer a short calibration drawn from Kiki's Delivery Service's own vocabulary, so we know which of its words you already have. Then, each week, you read a story written from the film's vocabulary, pitched just above your level: the words you meet are the words you are about to hear. Phrase-by-phrase explanations and spaced review keep them. The film is the finish line.
Where these words take you next
Films share everyday vocabulary, so the words you learn here travel. After Kiki's Delivery Service's curriculum, here is how much of each next film you would already cover:
| Next film | Already covered |
|---|---|
| My Neighbor Totoro | 38% of its dialogue |
| The Idiot | 38% of its dialogue |
| The Quiet Duel | 36% of its dialogue |
See how many of Kiki's Delivery Service's words you already know.
Start learning with Kiki's Delivery ServiceAll numbers on this page are computed from a full subtitle analysis of Kiki's Delivery Service, the same analysis the product plans from. Method: how we measure film difficulty.