Learn Japanese with Spirited Away

We analyzed every line of Spirited Away. It uses 846 unique words. The right 214 of them cover 70% of everything said, and this page shows the path to them.

846unique words
214words to 70%
569words to 90%
1,073lines analyzed

Why Spirited Away works as a destination

Spirited Away is the film people mean when they say they want to understand Ghibli in Japanese. The dialogue is everyday spoken Japanese (greetings, work, food, names), stretched across a world strange enough that you never stop wanting to know what was just said.

It is a middle-of-the-pack film in vocabulary terms: harder than Totoro, gentler than Princess Mononoke. A realistic first destination if you already know some Japanese and want the film you love to be the thing that pulls you forward.

千と千尋の神隠し: the title in Japanese

Spirited Away is 千と千尋の神隠し (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi): “The spiriting-away of Sen and Chihiro”.

神隠し (kamikakushi) means to be mysteriously hidden away by spirits. The English title compresses that phenomenon into “spirited away”.

The title is a pun you can only see in Japanese: Yubaba takes Chihiro's name 千尋 (Chihiro) and leaves her only its first character, 千, read alone as Sen.

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 Spirited Away curriculum, with how often you'll hear each across the film:

Word	Reading	Times heard
千尋	ちひろ	32
すぐ	すぐ	13
もう	もう	28
やっぱり	やっぱり	7
そう	そ	33
ない	ない	47
行く	いく	64
新しい	あたらしい	4

How far the words take you

Cumulative share of everything said in the film, as you learn its vocabulary in order of how much dialogue each word covers. Computed from the full subtitle analysis.

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 Spirited Away'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 Spirited Away's curriculum, here is how much of each next film you would already cover:

Next film	Already covered
Howl's Moving Castle	42% of its dialogue
Tales from Earthsea	39% of its dialogue
The Idiot	38% of its dialogue

See how many of Spirited Away's words you already know.

Start learning with Spirited Away

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