The Ultimate Japanese Shopping Vocabulary List [EN+DE]

I’ve been meaning to make this post in forever but as it happens, my thesis triggered a heavy fear of tables. The struggle is real. One of the most exciting things to write about in this blog is the actual combination of my knowledge (e.g. Japanese) with my favorite hobbies (beauty stuff) – I love when this happens! Combining two passions of mine always means a lot of work though, as I want to bring you the possible best I can provide. So in order to bring you this special post today, I first had to look up how the hell to create a table in HTML. Combine this with my general fear of tables and……yep, you might understand what took me so long.

Thinking back though, when I was coming to Japan for the very first time my Japanese was limited. Extremely limited. I had been studying in university for approximately 3 months so while I could form basic sentences, my ability to understand any random Japanese citizen was venturing against zero. It left my boyfriend and me with many fun stories but also with many missed opportunities. Even though I can’t make up for the lack of actual Japanese language skill, I can try to make your journey a bit more relaxed with as much guidance as I can provide! 🙂

Some general words about the Japanese language: Unlike most other countries, Japanese do still speak very little English in general. You will see that a lot of words in this list actually are derived from English. However, if you just use the normal English pronounciation, chances are that most Japanese will have no idea what you are talking about since they are so used to the Japanized version, so make sure to adjust in that respect. Don’t be shy to mutter some imperfect Japanese – at least trying to use their language opens up the locals and you will find many Japanese a lot more helpful if you at least try to communicate in their language. I made the table in English and German because I thought if I’m already gonna do it, why not do it right. Most Germans speak English well enough but for the few who don’t: This is for you!

I tried to give you a phonetical description of how the words are pronounced (as this sometimes differ a lot from how it is written). Since this is obviously a very difficult task to do when you don’t speak Japanese at all, I highly recommend to copy and paste the desired word or phrase into google translate and listening to the pronouncation there. It’s not perfect, but it will make many issues you might find with pronouncing at least a bit easier. If your communication partner doesn’t seem to understand you at all, feel free to show him this list and do the famous “pointing out” game! 😀 Also, you will probably notice that the overwhelming majority of Japanese words ends of “u”. In about 90% of the cases, the “u” is not pronounced but rather omitted (well, not exactly, but for this guide, it will have to do). Also, you will see a lot of “uu” “ii” and “oo”; a double consonant means that the consonant is spoken longer than you usually would.

I really hope this little table will be useful to someone with travel plans to Japan or even just for online googling around for finding products of a certain brand etc 🙂 I am totally planning on doing this same post also for Korean, but that might take a little bit longer since I am far from being fluent in Korean just yet. Find the Korean version here!

Also, I want this to be growing project for it to be most helpful so if there are any words or phrases missing, please feel free to point them out in the comment section! I will add them to this list for an easier shopping experience in Japan (hopefully).

It’s 2:30AM (again) and I have many obligations tomorrow so… have a good night everyone! I’m excited to get all your feedback about how I can make this more user-friendly in the future!
Lots of love,

Sam