Free practice · Vocabulary test
Get an estimate of your German vocabulary in about three minutes. No account needed.
Up to 52 questions, from all 200 levels of the course. No account needed.
How it goes
Press 1 to 4 to answer, 5 if you don’t know, then Enter to continue. A wrong guess counts against you; “I don’t know” costs nothing.
Under the hood
It is a sample of a few dozen words, so the result is an estimate. 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 noun, verb, adjective or adverb from one stage, drawn at random, so each run asks a different mix. Words an English speaker could read without any German, like Sommer, Energie or Psychotherapie, are left out: they would measure nothing.
You pick the meaning from four. The three wrong ones come from the same stage and the same part of speech, nouns of the same gender, and none is a synonym of the right one. A guess among four is right one time in four, so a wrong answer costs a third of a right one and guessing gains nothing on average. “I don’t know” costs nothing.
The test asks 4 words from each stage in turn and stops climbing once a stage is mostly unknown, or two in a row are half known. Then it asks up to 16 more, spread over the stages it reached by their size and by how unsettled their score still is, so a large stage you half knew gets the most.
Each stage’s share of known words is multiplied by the number of course words in that stage, and the stages are added up. A later stage cannot score above an earlier one, since rarer words are not known better than common ones, so such a run is averaged. A stage the test never reached counts as zero. The range is the span that held the true number about two times in three when the method was run on simulated learners, and everything is rounded because a few dozen words cannot support a precise figure.
Continue in the course
The test measures. The course takes it from there: mark the words you already know, and lessons move quickly to the ones you don’t.
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.
ortPlay