German 4: Your First 150 Words

A hundred and fifty words will not let you read a novel. They will let you say who you are, ask for what you want, count, name the day, and understand the small words that hold every sentence together. They are also enough to prove to yourself that remembering a language is a skill with a method, not a gift.

This piece is a deck: 150 German words on cards, each with an example sentence, every noun with its article and its plural, scheduled by a spaced-repetition algorithm so that each word comes back just before you would forget it. It explains how the deck was chosen, how the schedule works, and how to use it in ten minutes a day. Your progress is saved in your browser, shared with the trainers in the other German pieces, and can be exported.

Your device has no German voice, so the play buttons are hidden.

What is in the deck

The deck holds 150 words. They were chosen by judgement and checked against a published frequency list built from film and television subtitles: 119 of the 150 appear among its 1,000 most frequent word forms (counting a verb if any of its common forms does), and 136 among the first 3,000; the rest are survival words such as the numbers, the days and Bahnhof. They are not the 150 most frequent words in order; they are the 150 you need to start saying things.

Group	Words	A few of them
Pronouns	8	ich, du, er, sie, wir, Sie
Little words	36	und, aber, nicht, auch, mit, für, heute
Question words	8	was, wer, wo, wann, wie, warum
Verbs	27	sein, haben, können, möchten, gehen, machen
Numbers 0 to 20, and 100	22	null, eins, zwei, zwölf, zwanzig, hundert
Days of the week	7	Montag, Mittwoch, Samstag, Sonntag
Nouns	30	der Tag, die Zeit, das Haus, das Wasser
Adjectives	12	gut, groß, klein, neu, alt, müde

Notice what comes first: the small words and the verbs. In real speech, words like und, nicht, das and sein appear constantly, far more than any noun. That is the frequency idea from the first method piece, in practice: the words that appear most do the most work.

The numbers have two habits worth noticing on the cards. From thirteen to nineteen they are built like English (dreizehn, thirteen), with two small irregularities: sechzehn drops the s of sechs, and siebzehn drops the en of sieben. From twenty-one upwards the ones come first, as in the old English “four-and-twenty”: einundzwanzig, “one-and-twenty”.

Each word becomes two cards

Each card has the German, the English and an example sentence. Each word becomes two cards: German to English first, then, once you have passed that, English to German, which is harder and builds recall. The first direction is recognising; the second is producing, and producing is what you need when you speak.

Every noun appears with its article and its plural: der Tag, die Tage. When you produce a noun on the English-to-German side, count it right only if you also said the article. That one rule, kept from the first day, saves months of guessing later, because the article tells you the gender, and the gender decides the endings of almost every word around the noun. The plurals vary (Tage, Häuser, Frauen, Autos), and the safest habit is to learn them with the noun too; the common patterns become familiar on their own as you meet them.

How the schedule works

The scheduler is a simplified SM-2, the algorithm behind many flashcard apps. See the card, try to recall, reveal, and grade yourself honestly: Again, Hard, Good or Easy. A first success returns after 1 day, then 3 days, then the gap is multiplied by an ease factor that starts at 2.5; Hard lowers it and Easy raises it. Again sends the card back four cards later. The buttons show the next gap.

Here is what a card looks like if you press Good every time it returns:

Time it appears	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th
Next gap, in days	1	3	8	20	50	125

Six good recalls take a word from today to a gap of about four months. Press Again once on the way and the card returns the same session, drops its ease a little, and starts the climb over with shorter steps. That is the whole mechanism: the effort goes where forgetting is closest, and you stop spending minutes on words you already know.

Using the deck well

• Say the answer first. Out loud, or in your head, before you press Show answer. Looking is not recalling.
• Grade honestly. If you hesitated, guessed, or forgot the article, press Hard or Again. A flattering grade pushes the card too far away and you will pay for it later.
• Read the example. The sentence shows how the word behaves, and many of them repeat the patterns from the verb pieces. Say it aloud; play it if you have a voice.
• Do the reviews first. New cards are the fun part, but the reviews are what the schedule depends on.
• Keep it small. Ten new cards a day is a good rate. If the deck feels heavy, drop to five. A smaller habit beats a heroic start.

Making the words stick

The deck does the scheduling. Three small habits do the rest.

Use what English gives you. German and English are close relatives, and many everyday words show it: Haus (house), Hand, Wasser (water), trinken (drink), kommen (come), neu (new), alt (old). Treat these as free. But watch for false friends: bekommen means to get, not to become; Gift is poison; Chef is your boss, not a cook; also means “so, therefore”; Handy is a mobile phone; aktuell means current; eventuell means possibly. When a card looks too easy, check the example sentence.

Attach a word to something real. Say der Tisch when you put something on your table, das Wasser when you pour a glass. Naming things in your own life, with the article, gives the word a second route back into memory.

Meet the words again outside the deck. A word you have only seen on a card is fragile. Listen for the small words in any German audio, even if you understand little; the next time a card comes up, you will already know the sound of it.

Saving and moving your progress

The deck saves to your browser on this device, in a record shared with the trainers in the other German pieces. Clearing your browser data erases it, and a private window forgets everything when you close it. Export gives you a code to paste into a note; import restores it on this or another device.

Your first two weeks

Ten to twenty minutes a day, in this order: review the cards that are due, do one drill, then read or listen to something short. This table pulls the four German pieces together.

Days	Deck	Drill	Outside the page
1 to 2	10 new cards a day	Pronounce it: every chip. Vowel trainer: 15 words in each mode.	Read the vowel table aloud.
3 to 5	10 new, plus reviews	Trainer: regular present tense; ich, du, er.	Say your name, where you live and what you do, out loud.
6 to 9	Reviews first, then 10 new	Trainer: add the stem-changers. Start every sentence with a time word.	Five minutes of beginner listening.
10 to 12	Reviews, then new	Trainer: sein, haben, the modals. Gender sorter once a day.	Write five true sentences with möchte, kann, muss.
13 to 14	Reviews only if you are behind	Everything you have; the sorter in accusative mode.	Take the quizzes. Export your progress.

Where to go next

• 🌐 A free course with audio. Deutsche Welle: Learn German, from Germany’s international broadcaster: courses from A1, including the video series Nicos Weg, free and without advertising.
• 🌐 Listening from scratch. Language Transfer has a free audio introduction to German built around working the language out yourself.
• 🌐 Real people, real speech. Easy German: street interviews on YouTube with German and English subtitles; free to watch, with optional paid extras.
• 🌐 A dictionary. DWDS, free, with the gender, plural and forms of every word.
• 📘 A grammar to keep. Martin Durrell, Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage (Routledge): a reference, not a course; look things up when a sentence puzzles you.
• 📘 A frequency dictionary. Randall Jones and Erwin Tschirner, A Frequency Dictionary of German: Core Vocabulary for Learners (Routledge, 2006), the most frequent words with example sentences.
• 📘 Graded readers. Short books for A1 and A2 learners, from publishers such as Hueber, Klett and Cornelsen, once you finish the deck.
• 🗣 A person. A paid tutor or a language-exchange partner, one session a week, as soon as you can say twenty sentences. No app replaces talking to someone.

What sticks

• The 150 words are the ones you need to start saying things: small words and verbs first.
• Each word is two cards: German to English, then English to German, which builds recall.
• Every noun comes with its article and plural; count a card right only if you said the article.
• From twenty-one on, the ones come first: einundzwanzig.
• The scheduler widens the gap after each success (1, 3, 8, 20 days and so on) and sends a miss back sooner.
• Say the answer before you look, grade honestly, and do the reviews before the new cards.