What are the first 200 words to learn in German?
InputDojo publishes 207 core German words — the high-frequency vocabulary a beginner meets first, each with its part of speech, pronunciation and its own entry. German shares a great deal of its core vocabulary with English — Hand, Wasser, Buch, trinken — so the first couple of hundred words come quickly. What arrives with them is the case system, which means learning a noun in German is learning a noun plus its gender.
Key figures
- Core German words in InputDojo
- 207
- Level
- A1
- Entries with a page of their own
- 207
Our own difficulty estimate. No official beginner list is published for this language.
Why a few hundred words goes further than it sounds
Word frequency is extremely uneven in every language. A small set of function words — articles, pronouns, the handful of verbs meaning to be, to have, to go, to make — accounts for a disproportionate share of everything said, and the first few hundred words of German are mostly that set. This is why beginners can follow the shape of a conversation well before they can follow its content: the scaffolding is already familiar and only the specifics are missing.
Learn the article, not the noun
Every German noun carries a gender that decides its article and its case endings, and nothing about most nouns predicts it. The single highest-value habit in early German is storing der Tisch rather than Tisch, from the very first word. Learners who skip this spend years guessing, because retrofitting gender onto several hundred words you already half-know is far more work than attaching it on first contact.
Where a list stops helping
A list tells you which words to meet; it cannot make them stick. Recognition comes from encountering a word in enough different contexts that its meaning arrives without a lookup, and that requires reading and listening to German rather than reviewing the list again. Treat these 207 words as the set worth front-loading, then move to real material as soon as it is merely difficult rather than impossible.
The pages behind these numbers
Frequently asked questions
How many words do you need for basic German?
A few hundred core words handles everyday situations. The grammar, not the vocabulary, is what usually slows English speakers down.
How hard is German for English speakers?
The FSI places German one category above Spanish and French, at roughly 900 class hours, largely because of the case and gender system.
Do I really need to learn noun genders?
Yes. Gender determines article and adjective endings throughout the sentence, so guessing produces errors in every clause rather than one word.