Wordlists and vocabulary

A good resource for often used words are newspaper sites.

The Japanese language has good news publications (i.e. Yomiuri Shinbun([1]) and Asahi), and you can be happy knowing that the words that appear here are commonly used words, and using contemporary kanji.

Mainichi Daily News([2]) has many articles in English, which contain direct links to the original Japanese news articles originally translated from.