How Many Words Do You Need for German B1?
"How many words do I need for B1?" is the first question almost everyone asks when an exam date appears in their calendar. The honest answer depends on how you count, so we counted. In this post you will see the number, where it comes from, which words matter most for the four B1 exams (Goethe-Zertifikat B1, telc Deutsch B1, the DTZ and ÖSD B1), and how to turn the number into a daily plan.
The number: about 3,200 headwords from A1 to B1
The Goethe-Institut and ÖSD publish word lists for A1, A2 and B1. The B1 list is described as roughly 2,400 lexical units, but it builds on the two lists below it, and a lexical unit is not always one word: some entries are fixed expressions, some are word families. We turned the three published inventories into single headwords (one entry per word, article and plural kept for nouns, verb forms removed) and removed duplicates between the levels. The result:
| Level | New headwords at this level | Running total |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | 732 | 732 |
| A2 | 604 | 1,336 |
| B1 | 1,850 | 3,186 |
So the realistic target for B1 is a little over 3,000 words, of which more than half are new at B1. If you finished an A2 course, you already have the first 1,300.
Why "3,000 words" is not the whole story
A word list tells you which words exist at the level. The exam marks something slightly different:
- Writing is marked on range and register. An informal e-mail to a friend and a formal e-mail to a course leader need different openings, requests and closings. Those are phrases, not words.
- Connectors are part of the grade. "Obwohl", "deshalb", "trotzdem" and "einerseits ... andererseits" change the word order, and using them correctly is what separates a pass from a good pass.
- Office German appears everywhere. Antrag, Frist, Bescheid, Termin, Formular: the DTZ in particular is built around letters from offices and landlords.
That is why a list alone rarely gets people through the exam. What works is the list plus the phrases and structures the tasks need, studied in sentences like the ones you will read and write.
From the number to a daily plan
The arithmetic is simple, and it is worth doing before you book the exam:
- Subtract what you know. A quick vocabulary check gives you an estimate.
- Divide by the days you have, minus one week. Keep the last week for review only.
- Add review time. With spaced repetition, each new card costs about 25 seconds the first time and about 8 seconds per review afterwards, with roughly three reviews a day for every new card in the early weeks.
For example, if you know 1,300 of the words and your exam is 16 weeks away, you need about 17 new words a day: roughly 15 minutes of study. With 8 weeks left it is about 38 new words a day and 30 minutes. With less than a month, focus on the writing and speaking phrases and the connectors first; they earn the most points per hour.
What we built from this count
We used the count as the checklist for our German B1 Exam Kit: the words sorted into the eleven topics the B1 exams write their tasks about (from family and housing to offices and opinions), plus Redemittel for the writing and speaking tasks, connectors and grammar in context, and the words of exam day itself. Every card has an exam-style example sentence, a translation, a short German definition and audio in a natural-sounding German text-to-speech voice. The list itself is our own work: the official lists are only the measuring stick, and no example sentence comes from exam material.
You can try the first 20 cards for free, take the vocabulary check to see how many of the words you already know, and read which German level you need for citizenship if the exam is for a passport.
Words on Repeat is not affiliated with the Goethe-Institut, telc, ÖSD or the BAMF.