How many words for each level
How many German words do you already know? The free test shows your vocabulary size and CEFR level in 3 minutes.
Take the test →| Level | Words | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | up to 1,500 | Introduce yourself, order in a café, ask the way and understand simple signs like Eingang and Ausgang. |
| A2 | 1,500–2,500 | Talk about work, family and your day, read short messages and fill in simple forms. |
| B1 | 2,750–3,250 | Handle most situations when travelling, follow the main points of clear talk and write a short email to a landlord. |
| B2 | 3,250–3,750 | Keep up a conversation with native speakers, read Der Spiegel with a little effort and follow the news. |
| C1 | 3,750–4,500 | Work and study in German, read long articles and understand films without subtitles in most scenes. |
The ranges come from Milton and Alexiou (2009), who linked vocabulary size tests to CEFR levels in European languages; there is no German-only scale of the same kind. They estimate receptive vocabulary, the words you recognise, not the words you use when speaking. All levels in one table: how many words you need for A1–C1.
How much of a text the most common words cover
German vocabulary is very top-heavy. In the Duden corpus the 100 most frequent words make up almost half of all words in texts, and the 2,475 most frequent cover 75%. A Stockholm study (Winnerlöv 2012) found that the first 2,000 words reach about 80% of a German text, but for comfortable reading research on English points to 98%, which takes thousands of words more.
Start with these words
These words appear in almost every German sentence, so each one pays off immediately. Tschirner (2006) found that about half of the 1,000 most frequent German words were missing from the A1–B1 productive word lists of Profile Deutsch, so don’t rely on a textbook alone.
- sein to be
- haben to have
- werden to become; will
- können can, to be able to
- müssen must, to have to
- sagen to say
- geben to give
- machen to do, to make
- und and
- aber but
- oder or
- weil because
- dass that
- wenn if, when
- was what
- wie how
- heute today
- jetzt now
- immer always
- schon already
- noch still, yet
- dann then
- das Jahr year
- die Zeit time
- der Mensch person, human
- die Frau woman; wife
- der Mann man; husband
- das Kind child
- die Stadt town, city
- das Land country
- das Haus house
- die Welt world
What makes German vocabulary easier or harder
Many everyday words are close relatives of English ones, so you get a head start. Haus, Buch, trinken and Wasser are easy to guess as house, book, drink and water.
Some familiar-looking words mean something else entirely. Bekommen means to get, not to become, and das Gift is poison, not a present.
German has three genders that often don’t follow meaning, and plurals are hard to predict. Learn das Mädchen (neuter, a girl) and das Buch, die Bücher as one unit, never the bare noun.
Long words are usually chains of short ones: der Handschuh is literally “hand shoe”, a glove. Verbs like anrufen split in a sentence, as in Ich rufe dich morgen an, so learn them with an example.
Which topics to learn at each level
- A1. yourself and family, numbers, days and times, food and drink, shopping, the home. Learn each noun with der, die or das from day one.
- A2. work and school, health and the doctor, travel and transport, weather, free time, the town. Add the plural to every new noun.
- B1. feelings and opinions, the media, renting a flat, money and the bank, the environment, official letters. This is where separable verbs pile up.
- B2. work and careers, politics and society, science and technology, culture and the arts. Start reading the news and collect compounds by topic.
- C1. abstract and academic vocabulary, idioms, formal style, specialist words for your field. Focus on nuance, such as the difference between bekommen, erhalten and kriegen.
Type a topic or a level into the generation chat in the app, for example “B1: work and career”, and get a word set with examples in context, audio and smart reviews. Any other topic works too.
How long it takes
At 10 new words a day with regular reviews you add about 300 words a month and about 3,600 a year, enough for B1 in under a year; at 20 a day it takes about half as long. The Foreign Service Institute puts German in Category II, about 36 weeks (900 class hours) for English speakers, longer than Spanish or Italian. In practice, plan for reviews: a word you met once but never repeated is usually gone within a week.
How NewLexi helps you build your vocabulary
In NewLexi you generate word sets by level or by topic, already split into categories, for example “A2: at the doctor” or the words for your Goethe exam. Every word comes in context with audio and der, die or das, and spaced repetition brings it back just before you forget it. Stories and dialogues are written for you, at your level and with your words, so new vocabulary turns into reading and listening. You can also import words by photo or from Anki and Quizlet, and check your progress with the free vocabulary test.
