Free practice · Vocabulary test
A short test on words from every stage of the course, from the first lessons to the last. It takes two or three minutes and ends with an estimate of your German vocabulary and the level to start at.
Up to 36 questions, drawn from 17,120 entries across 212 levels. No account needed.
How it goes
Press 1 to 4 to answer, 5 if you don’t know.
Under the hood
It is a sample, done honestly. Here is the whole method.
The course’s levels are grouped into nine stages of growing width, from the first lessons to the last. Each question takes a common noun, verb, adjective, or adverb from one stage, chosen from a pool at random, so no two runs ask the same words.
You pick the meaning from four. The three wrong ones come from the same stage and the same part of speech, and none of them is a synonym of the right one. A lucky guess is worth about one word in four, and “I don’t know” is always an answer.
Each stage’s share of right answers is multiplied by the number of course entries in that stage, and the stages are added up. A stage the test never reached counts as zero, so the estimate leans low rather than high, and it is rounded because a few dozen words cannot support a precise number.
The first stage where you knew fewer than 80% of its words is where to start, because 80% is the share of a level the course wants settled before it opens the next. The test ends once a stage is mostly unknown, or two in a row are half known. How levels open.
The same material, inside the course
The test guesses where you stand. The course takes it from there: mark the words you already know, and lessons begin where your German does.
Each word gets its own spaced-repetition timing, so the ones you miss return sooner and the ones you know stay out of the way.
Meet a few words at a time with article, plural, and meaning, then type them German to English and English to German.
Gender, verb forms, prepositions, and sentence gaps open as your vocabulary grows, across a course of more than 17,000 entries.
The words and meanings come from the Wortplay course, whose vocabulary draws on the Ding dictionary and on frequency data from wordfreq. About the sources.