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Learn Japanese with My Neighbor Totoro

We analyzed every line of My Neighbor Totoro. It uses 529 unique words. The right 155 of them cover 70% of everything said, and this page shows the path to them.

• 529unique words
• 155words to 70%
• 388words to 90%
• 778lines analyzed

Why My Neighbor Totoro works as a destination

Totoro sits near the top of our Ghibli difficulty ranking: a small vocabulary, reused constantly. The dialogue is a family settling into a house in the countryside (children's speech, chores, school, weather). It is the register textbooks promise and rarely deliver.

That makes it the classic first film to watch in Japanese: short sentences and concrete words, with long wordless stretches that let you rest.

となりのトトロ: the title in Japanese

My Neighbor Totoro is となりのトトロ (Tonari no Totoro): “The Totoro next door”.

となり (tonari) means next door, or the seat beside you: the friendliest word for “neighbor” Japanese has. The title promises the domestic film you get.

トトロ is written in katakana, the script Japanese uses for made-up and borrowed names. The film suggests it is Mei's mispronunciation of トロール (troll).

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 My Neighbor Totoro curriculum, with how often you'll hear each across the film:

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 My Neighbor Totoro'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 My Neighbor Totoro's curriculum, here is how much of each next film you would already cover:

All numbers on this page are computed from a full subtitle analysis of My Neighbor Totoro, the same analysis the product plans from. Method: how we measure film difficulty.