German has 7 articles: the 500 phrases for a first month, the page on the mistakes English speakers keep making, and frequency lists for the parts of speech that carry a sentence. The statistics page counts the German half of the corpus by level and by theme.
Read the 500 first if you are moving, and the noun list first if you are studying, because the gender has to be learned with the word and cannot be reconstructed from it later. German is thin here next to Spanish, and the gap is the same one French has. The situation pages, from the restaurant to a first week in an office, exist in Spanish only so far. Read the mistakes page early.Es ist halb drei is 2:30, and an English ear reads it as half past three.
Where to start
- The 500 German phrases you actually needthe list for a first month, in the order a day happens.
- German mistakes English speakers keep makingthe half drei problem and the rest of them, early.
- Most common German nouns, ranked by frequencythe gender has to be learned with the word, so learn them together.
- German vocabulary, by the numberswhat the pair actually holds, level by level and theme by theme.
Start here
The pages we made for German itself: the phrase list, the traps, and the numbers behind the pair.
The 500 German phrases you actually need
500 German phrases for surviving, travelling and working, grouped by the situations of a day, with the trap and the Sie or du call noted beside each.
The Vocabcord 200 for NursesGerman for nurses: 200 ward phrases
200 German phrases for a nursing shift: the Übergabe, the ward's own verbs, the medication round, pain words patients use, the call bell, the rota.
The Vocabcord 500 · GermanGerman mistakes English speakers keep making
Halb drei means 2:30 and Ich bin kalt says you are a cold person. The register, timing, regional and false-friend traps in the German 500.
Corpus statisticsGerman vocabulary, by the numbers
Every German entry the app ships, counted by CEFR level and by theme, computed from the pack manifests themselves.
Words and frequency
Which words to spend your time on, ranked from our own corpus.
Most common German nouns, ranked by frequency
The most common German nouns split three ways: der, die, and das. See the frequency list with audio and how compound nouns inherit their gender.
German · A1 to C2Most common German verbs: A1 to C2 frequency ladder
The most common German verbs are sein, haben, werden, and machen. See the full frequency ladder, 110 verbs at A1 down to 12 at C2, with audio.
Situations and themes
One situation or one theme per page, taken to the end of the list.
Reference
The closed systems: the calendar, the clock, the numbers, the word classes. Pages you look something up in.
The rest of the site
The six phrase lists share one page: The Vocabcord 500 says what they are, how they were written and how to cite them. The corpus statistics count all six pairs at once, and the methodology page explains how a phrase gets a level and a theme. Teachers can run a list as a scheme of work from the teachers page. Everything else we publish is on the blog.
If a translation, a level or a note on any of these pages is wrong, tell us on the support page. Corrections from people who live in the language are the only way this stays honest.