This list of most frequent 300 German words will 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.

According to linguists, knowing 800 to 1000 most frequent words brings your understanding of a language to 75-85%. Unfortunately, Each next increment requires much more vocabulary though. However, once you have your foundation in place, learning more vocabulary becomes much easier.

Learning top 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 the word and in what context it’s the most relevant.

Also, rote memorization is outright 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.

Neurons that fire together, wire together Hebb’s Law

List of the 100 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 is already in the kwiko app. You can learn all these words effectively with the kwiko app. All these words and their examples are already available there:

Conclusion – a word of warning

I want to repeat once again that rote memorization of most frequent words on their own is an ineffective use of your time. 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.