How many German words do you actually need?
Most answers to this question are guesses. This one is measured: 21,417,287 words of German text from two Leipzig corpora, counted by lemma. The short version is that the first hundred words carry about half of everything, and the returns fall off a cliff after that.
What each hundred words buys you
| Top N lemmas | mixed genres, 2011 | news, 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | 28% | 26.2% |
| 50 | 43.2% | 43.2% |
| 100 | 49.1% | 49.6% |
| 150 | 52.2% | 52.8% |
| 200 | 54.1% | 55% |
Why the curve flattens so fast
Word frequency is extraordinarily lopsided. A handful of words — articles, pronouns, prepositions, auxiliaries — appear in almost every sentence, while the vast majority of the vocabulary appears rarely. Going from 0 to 100 lemmas buys you roughly half of all running text. Going from 100 to 200 buys you about 5.0 percentage points more. That is the entire argument for learning the most common words first, and it is why a hundred well-chosen words beat a thousand random ones.
So what is the honest number?
For reading and listening, coverage is what matters, and the numbers above tell that story directly. For speaking, coverage is the wrong measure: you need concrete words for the things you want to talk about, and those are rare in text precisely because they are specific. Around 500 well-chosen words is enough to hold simple everyday exchanges. A thousand to two thousand makes most day-to-day situations comfortable. Fluency in the ordinary sense sits somewhere around five thousand — but you reach it far faster if the first thousand are the right thousand.
The caveat worth stating
These figures come from written German — news and mixed-genre text. Everyday speech would rank the personal pronouns higher and werden lower, and would lean more on a small set of very common verbs. The shape of the curve is the same; the exact percentages would shift by a point or two.
Try it
All 182 words are in the free trainer — flashcards, multiple choice, listening practice and spaced review. No account needed.