Your first 100 German words

How was this list of German words chosen?

Most first-word lists are someone's guess. This one is counted. We took the free chapters (1 and 2) of all 24 A1 and A2 series in the Contos German library, October 2026 export: 48 chapters and 9,689 words of story text. We counted every word form, ignoring capital letters, then removed character names and any word found in fewer than 5 of the 48 chapters, so one story's dog or prop can't sneak in. These are the 100 most frequent forms that were left.

Together they make up about 53% of every word in those chapters, and about 55% of the A1 chapters alone. Learn them and half of a beginner story is already familiar.

For a general-purpose ranking, Erwin Tschirner and Jupp Möhring's A Frequency Dictionary of German (2nd edition, Routledge) covers the 5,000 most common words in a 20-million-word corpus of spoken and written German. For why a list like this matters, see how many German words you need.

Which little words hold German sentences together?

These 43 words are short and easy to skim past, but they fill the biggest share of every page. You rarely need to study them as vocabulary; you need to recognise them instantly.

Articles: the and a (8)

German has several forms of the and a, and the choice depends on the noun's gender and its job in the sentence. That is why den and einen are in the list: they mark a masculine noun that something is done to, as in this line from an A1 mystery:

Brief is masculine (der Brief), and here it is the thing being written, so ein becomes einen. Every word in that sentence is on this page.

Pronouns and possessives (15)

Sie with a capital is the polite you, used with strangers, landlords and anyone you call Herr or Frau. In a story's dialogue the capital tells you which one you are reading; at the start of a sentence you have to judge from the verb and the context.

Prepositions (13)

Linking and question words (7)

Which German verb forms come first?

Beginner stories are told in the present tense, mostly about one person at a time, so the commonest forms are he-or-she forms: sagt, sieht, kommt. Learn the form you see; the dictionary form is there so you can look up the rest of the verb later.

Two pairs trip up English speakers. Kennt and weiß both mean knows: kennen is for people, places and things you are familiar with, wissen for facts. And sieht (sees) and schaut (looks) split the work that English does with see and look. Watch for verbs that leave part of themselves at the end of the sentence: in Herr Krause sieht nervös aus (A2), sieht … aus means looks, as in appears.

Which German nouns, adverbs and adjectives should you know?

Nouns, with their articles (16)

Learn every noun with its article, as in the table, because the article tells you how all the small words around the noun will behave. A few patterns help: die Tür, die Hand and die Küche are feminine, as are almost all nouns ending in -ung such as die Wohnung. Herr and Frau double as Mr and Mrs, so Frau Müller is Mrs Müller. And der Morgen is the morning, while lower-case morgen means tomorrow.

How, when and how much (17)

Nicht is the most common word in this group, at 130 times, because German says no to a verb with nicht and no to a noun with kein (no, not a). Plötzlich (suddenly) shows up in 19 of the 48 chapters: every chapter needs its turning point.

The quickest way to fix these words is to meet them in a story rather than a table. For a themed set, try our German travel vocabulary.