German vocabulary overview
LangOria's German course is currently built around practical sentence pairs from the Tatoeba corpus — a crowdsourced database of translations by native German speakers. The vocabulary is organised by CEFR level: A1 covers survival German, A2 covers everyday conversation, B1 covers working German. Each entry pairs a German sentence with its English translation so you can read, listen, and shadow the natural rhythm of native German speech — including the verb-final word order in subordinate clauses that trips up most beginners. The corpus is sampled across the major German-speaking regions — Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and the South Tyrol — so you will see both 'Brötchen' (Germany) and 'Semmel' (Austria, Bavaria) for bread roll, both 'Kartoffel' and the Swiss-German-influenced 'Herdöpfel' surfaced as a tooltip, and the formal 'Sie' alongside the casual 'du'. The audio uses de-DE voices and the rate is dialed down to 0.92× so you can hear the distinction between the voiced /b/ and /d/ at the start of words and their unvoiced counterparts /p/ and /t/ at the end — a contrast that does not exist in English but is meaningful in German (rad vs Rat, Bund vs bunt). Each sentence also marks separable verbs (aufstehen → ich stehe auf, nicht: ich aufstehe) so the prefix-position pattern is visible from day one, and the same verb is shown in main-clause and subordinate-clause word order side by side at A2. Plural formation is irregular in German and the corpus entry's tooltip always shows the full nominative plural form so you do not have to guess whether to add -e, -er, or -en. The declension table for 'der / die / das' is pinned at the top of the level so you can refer back to it while you study.
German vocabulary by level
Click any level to see the full list of words at that tier.
Why LangOria's German vocabulary works
Real example sentences
Every word comes with a real example from the Tatoeba corpus — no synthetic textbook filler.
Spaced repetition
Reviews are scheduled at the moment you are about to forget, so you retain more in less time.
45–65-minute daily loop
A short focused daily session beats a long abandoned one — streaks keep you honest.
German vocabulary FAQ
How is German vocabulary organised on LangOria?
By recognised ability levels — CEFR for most languages, JLPT for Japanese, HSK for Chinese and TOPIK for Korean. Each level groups the vocabulary you need at that stage, ordered by frequency and difficulty.
How many German words do I need per level?
It depends on the level and exam system: A1 covers roughly the 500 highest-frequency words and C2 the rarest academic and literary vocabulary; HSK 1 is 150 words and N5 around 800. Every deck pairs each word with a real example sentence from the Tatoeba corpus.
Where do the example sentences come from?
From Tatoeba, a community-built corpus of translations written by native speakers. Each example is designed for spaced-repetition review, so you meet words in the contexts native speakers actually use.
What is the best way to study German vocabulary?
The 45–65-minute daily spaced-repetition loop: review each word just as you are about to forget it. Pick the level that matches your goal — survival (A1), everyday conversation (A2-B1) or professional/fluent (B2-C1) — and move up one level at a time.