VocabularyJLPT N5 · core

アパート

hepburn apaato

apartment (small rental)

Part of speech · noun

Pattern visualization

no decomposition available

Examples

アパートに住んでいる。
I live in an apartment.
駅前のアパートは安い。
The apartment in front of the station is cheap.

Collocations

アパート (apaato, low-rise apartment)アパート暮らし (apaato-gurashi, apartment living)一階のアパート (ikkai no apaato, ground-floor apartment)木造アパート (mokuzou apaato, wooden apartment)マンション (manshon, condominium)

Mnemonic

Apaato (アパート) is "apartment / low-rise rental" — an A entry combining a cross-cultural loanword with a Japan-unique semantic shift. From English "apartment," but Japan narrowed it. Precise trap: (1) Japanese apaato = "2-3-story wooden or light-steel small rental housing, older builds, cheaper rent, mainly for poor students, newlyweds, or single OLs" — divergent from generic English "apartment"; (2) Japanese manshon (マンション, from English "mansion" but reworked) = "3+-story reinforced-concrete mid-to-upper-grade, often high-rise, condo for sale or premium rental" — diverging from English mansion meaning a grand estate; (3) the apaato-versus-manshon binary is Japan-unique housing taxonomy — direct English translation breaks since the value split is marketing-driven; (4) sheahausu (sharehouse, popular for foreign students and single OLs since 2010); (5) housing notations like 6-jou 1K, 8-jou 1DK, 3LDK (jou = tatami size, K = kitchen, DK = dining-kitchen, LDK = living-dining-kitchen). Trap: Japans real-estate sites split "apaato" search (wooden low-rises only) from "manshon" (mid-to-high concrete) — its essential. Korean apateu often means premium high-rises (overlapping Japans manshon, opposite of Japanese apaato); Chinese gōng-yù is generic. JLPT N5 plus a Japanese loanword-semantic-shift and housing-taxonomy cultural artifact.

Quick check

Core difference between apaato and manshon?