300 most frequently used German words with examples

Overview

According to linguists, knowing 800 to 1000 most frequent words brings your understanding of a language to 75-85%. We created a list of 300 most frequently used German verbs, adjectives, and nouns to help you build a solid vocabulary foundation. Especially if you are still at A1 or A2 level. For more advanced learners, the list serves as a good checklist to spot gaps in your vocabulary.

Learning most used German words in context

One important feature of this list is that each word comes with an example and its translation. This is ultra-important as rote memorization of even 10K words will be futile and useless if you don’t learn how to actually use those words in an actual sentence and in what context it’s the most relevant.

Also, rote memorization is ineffective and boring. Our brain filters out anything that it finds irrelevant and you will have a hard time making your brain truly believe that a word-translation pair alone is very important for you to keep it in your long-term memory. Therefore you need to create associations for each word or phrase you learn - connect it to other words and phrases and mental models existing in your brain. By the way, if you are looking for a flashcard app to learn vocabulary, we created this detailed post about the best-in-class flashcard apps.

List of the 300 most frequent nouns, verbs, and adjectives

This google sheet with the top 300 German words is free and you don’t need to give your email or your soul to access it 😂😁😈. It’s a community resource for everyone:

‍Go to the list.

By the way, this list and many others are already in the Heylama flashcard app. Heylama app is a free and powerful vocabulary learning tool that you can use on the web, mobile or Telegram.

Take action

Please keep in mind rote memorization of most frequent words on their own is an ineffective use of your time. The process must be enjoyable. Instead, discover new vocabulary naturally by watching movies and YouTube videos in German, reading books, listening to podcasts and talking to other people. This way you will be learning much more effortlessly and progress much faster.

Next, go to the list and start learning!

Mach's gut,
Sherzod