How many German words do you need for A1, A2 and B1?

The published word lists behind the German exams give an unusually honest answer to a question learners normally have to guess at:

• A1 - around 650 words
• A2 - around 1,300 words (including A1)
• B1 - around 2,400 words (including A1 and A2)

These are small numbers. Twenty-four hundred words is a fraction of what a native speaker uses, and it is enough to pass an exam that unlocks permanent residence. The catch is that they have to be the right 2,400 - and that they have to be available to you under time pressure, which is a different thing from recognising them on a flashcard.

Why the list beats a bigger vocabulary

Exam texts are written from these lists. A candidate who knows the B1 list thoroughly will meet almost no unknown words in the reading module; a candidate with 5,000 words learned from films and songs will meet several, because their 5,000 overlap the list imperfectly. Coverage beats size.

Learn words in the shape the exam uses them

Three habits make the difference:

• Nouns with their article and plural. der Termin, die Termine. Learning Termin alone means guessing the case later - and cases are marked.
• Verbs with their preposition. sich bewerben um, sich interessieren für, warten auf. The preposition is the hard part and the part the exam tests.
• Collocations, not words. einen Termin vereinbaren, eine Wohnung mieten, sich krankmelden, eine Rechnung begleichen. Exam tasks are built from these blocks, and knowing the block means recognising it instantly.

Learn by theme, because the exam does

Both the exams and everyday life come in topics: personal details, family, housing, health, work, education, travel, shopping, authorities, free time. Studying a theme at a time means every word arrives with a context to hang on - and when a reading text turns out to be about a rental dispute, the whole vocabulary set surfaces together.

Spaced repetition, not marathon sessions

Fifteen minutes a day beats two hours on Sunday, because forgetting is a function of time, not of effort. A spaced-repetition schedule shows you a word again just before you would lose it: correct answers push the next review further out, mistakes bring it forward. You stop deciding what to revise and simply do the session.

PassDeutsch builds the A1, A2 and B1 lists into short game rounds - quiz, matching, fill-in-the-blank - on exactly that schedule, with definitions available in all eight app languages so you can check a meaning in Bengali, Turkish, Arabic, Ukrainian, Russian or Hindi without breaking the exercise.

Move words from passive to active

Recognising trotzdem in a text is passive knowledge; using it in a letter is active. Reading and listening only need the passive kind, which is why vocabulary apps feel so productive - and why people are surprised when the writing score does not follow. The transfer is simple but not optional: every day, take five new words and write one true sentence about your own life with each. Then say them out loud.

A realistic schedule

Level	Target	New words per day	Time to cover the list
A1	~650	15	about 6 weeks
A2	~1,300	20	about 8 weeks (from A1)
B1	~2,400	25	about 12 weeks (from A2)

Add review time on top - roughly the same again - and note that the last two weeks before an exam should be pure review, not new vocabulary. New words learned in the final fortnight rarely survive exam pressure; consolidated ones do.