Immersion Atlas Insights

Understand Terrace House Japanese

Published · 245 episodes · 5 eras · 129.5 hours · 2,413,416 subtitle characters

Six Terrace House cast members seated together in the show’s living room.

Create your personal Terrace House deck

Every card carries a real line from the show, minus the words you already know.

Every word and expression in this guide is listed in the tables below.

The words the house actually says

Bars show how much of the show a word turns up in. Five is everywhere; one still means at least 10 episodes across 3 eras.

How people talk 111

The machinery of a conversation: reacting, softening, being polite, and talking about talking.

Feelings and each other 149

What six housemates actually discuss: how they feel, who they like, and what went wrong.

House life, plans and work 141

Sharing a kitchen, arranging to be somewhere, and chasing whatever brought them here.

Set phrases you will hear every episode

Set phrases 44

Two shows in one: the studio and the house

Terrace House cuts between six housemates in a kitchen and six professional comedians in a studio. They are not speaking the same Japanese, and the deck above is built from the housemates only.

Who is talkingDifficulty VocabularySpeedChars/min Polite / 1kCasual / 1k
Studio panel64 4692 45522.89 10.48
Housemates50 3670 3909.37 10.64

The five eras

EraEpisodesHours Subtitle charsChars/min
Boys × Girls Next Door9539.7718,351295
Opening New Doors4931.1568,758306
Boys & Girls in the City4623.2420,348304
Aloha State3621.9405,485309
Tokyo 2019–20201913.6300,474367
All five245 129.52,413,416
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How we measured this

Every number here comes from 245 episodes of Terrace House across 5 eras — 129.5 hours and 2,413,416 characters of Japanese subtitles, measured on 2026-08-30.

These are human-written subtitles, not speech recognition, which is why every card can carry a real line. They are also condensed for reading speed, so a subtitle character count slightly understates what is actually said. That makes the chars-per-minute figures comparable within Terrace House and not against our YouTube catalogue, and it is why every claim about a word is a count of episodes rather than a rate.

Just under half of all subtitle cues name their speaker. That is what lets us separate the studio panel from the housemates, and the deck is built from housemate conversation only — the panel is a professional television register, 14 points harder on our 0–100 difficulty scale, and it is not what you came to learn.

Words were written by hand, then measured and cut: published only if they appear in at least 10 episodes across 3 eras and clear the same JMdict dictionary check the rest of the site uses. 401 words and 44 expressions survived. 8 entries (ヤバい, 意外と, モテる, ヤツ, ウワサ, メシ, お客, もうちょい) carry a reading supplied by hand rather than by the dictionary: each is ordinary spoken Japanese that JMdict indexes under a different spelling, and each was checked individually. Example sentences are real lines chosen by a person from the ranked candidates, one per card, each credited to its episode.