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Learn Japanese with Rashomon

We analyzed every line of Rashomon. It uses 668 unique words. The right 187 of them cover 70% of everything said, and this page shows the path to them.

• 668unique words
• 187words to 70%
• 486words to 90%
• 530lines analyzed

Why Rashomon works as a destination

Rashomon needs fewer words to understand than any film in our catalogue (fewer than every Ghibli film) because it is one story told four times. The same events, the same words, returning in different mouths: the film is a built-in spaced-repetition loop.

Nobody teaches Japanese through Kurosawa, which is a shame: this is clear mid-century spoken Japanese, and the testimony structure means you know the context of a line before you hear it.

羅生門: the title in Japanese

Rashomon is 羅生門 (Rashōmon): The ruined southern gate of Heian-era Kyoto.

羅生門 (Rashōmon) names the great southern gate of old Kyoto, ruined in the film. It is where the retellings are traded.

The film adapts two Akutagawa Ryūnosuke stories: 藪の中 (Yabu no Naka, “In a Grove”) supplies the contradictory testimonies, 羅生門 the gate. Its contradictions were memorable enough that English borrowed the title back: the “Rashomon effect”.

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 Rashomon 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 Rashomon'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 Rashomon'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 Rashomon, the same analysis the product plans from. Method: how we measure film difficulty.