Start from zero with the German words and phrases you will hear on your very first day. Clear meanings, simple pronunciation, no grammar overload.
German has a reputation for being hard. It is not — it is just taught badly. Here is the order that works.
German spelling is consistent: once you know the sounds, you can read almost any word out loud correctly. We start there, so every new word sticks.
Articles, greetings, everyday nouns and the ten verbs that carry most German sentences. High-frequency words first, always. The same core set turns up in every language — see the first 100 words to learn in any language.
Cases and word order come in small doses, attached to real sentences you can already say, instead of as tables to memorise. There is a reason for that order: why vocabulary comes before grammar.
Learn these and you can already understand and be understood in simple everyday situations.
Nouns are shown with their article (der, die, das). Learn the article together with the word from day one — it saves a lot of trouble later. If you already speak Spanish or Portuguese, you can drill this same beginner vocabulary in your own language at alemánbásico or Alemão Básico.
Eight sentences that cover most first conversations in German.
A realistic order for your first weeks of German.
Take them ten at a time. Say each one out loud twice — German rewards speaking early. At five to ten words a day that is under a week, and spaced retrieval is what makes them stay.
Full sentences give the words a home and make them far easier to remember.
Zahlen, Wochentage and Uhrzeit unlock shopping, appointments and small talk.
Combine a subject, one of the ten verbs, and a noun you already know. Simple beats perfect. If Spanish is your first language, the free German level test at alemánbásico is a quick way to check where you actually are.
Most people who set out to learn German begin in the wrong place. They open a textbook, meet a table of four cases and three genders on page six, and conclude that German is simply harder than other languages. It is not. It is front-loaded badly. Everything below is the short version of what changes if you start with words instead.
Far fewer than most beginners assume. The thirty words on this page are survival level: enough to greet someone, be polite and name a few everyday things. Around 100 words carries you through introductions, ordering food and asking simple questions. Around 500 words covers most routine daily exchanges, which is roughly the A0 to A1 range. At about 1,000 high-frequency words you can hold a simple conversation and sit an A1 exam without stress. The research behind those numbers is in how many words you need to speak a language.
After that, word frequency falls off a cliff. The two-thousandth most common German word turns up dramatically less often than the two-hundredth, which is why the order you learn words in matters far more than the total you have collected. Learning der Tag and das Wasser early pays back every single day. Learning die Zahnfleischentzündung early pays back roughly never.
Both are levels in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, the scale used across Europe to describe what a learner can do. A0 is absolute beginner: no prior German is assumed. A1 means you can introduce yourself, ask and answer simple questions about where you live, people you know and things you own, and follow speech when someone talks slowly and clearly. The usual first certificate at this level is the Goethe-Zertifikat A1, also called Start Deutsch 1. What A1 level actually means walks through the descriptors in full.
If you are working towards that exam and Portuguese is your first language, Alemão Básico has exam-focused material for the Goethe certificates written in Portuguese.
Reading a word list again feels productive and mostly is not. What moves a word into long-term memory is retrieval: trying to recall it, getting it slightly wrong, and being corrected. Spaced repetition simply schedules those attempts at the moment you are about to forget, so each review does the most work possible. The full method is in how to memorize vocabulary faster.
Ten minutes of that a day will outperform an hour of highlighting at the weekend, which is why both of our sister sites are built around daily review rather than long study sessions: alemánbásico for Spanish speakers and Alemão Básico for Portuguese speakers, both taking you from the first 100 words through to 1,000.
German spelling is consistent, which is its great advantage over English. Learn a handful of rules and you can read almost any German word out loud correctly, including ones you have never seen:
German nouns come in three genders, and the article changes with them: der Mann, die Frau, das Kind. There are patterns worth knowing later, but there is no rule that covers everything, and trying to derive gender from meaning will mislead you more often than it helps — das Mädchen, the girl, is grammatically neuter.
The fix is boring and it works: never learn a noun without its article. Store der Tag, not Tag. It costs nothing extra at the start and saves you re-learning several hundred words later, once cases arrive and the article starts changing shape.
You will learn faster when explanations arrive in the language you think in. This page teaches German through English. If your first language is Spanish or Portuguese, you do not have to route everything through a third language: alemánbásico covers the A0 to A1 vocabulary in Spanish, and Alemão Básico publishes the same beginner guides in Portuguese. Both use the same idea this site is built on: high-frequency words first, daily review, grammar only once it explains something you have already seen.
English and German are both Germanic languages, so you start with thousands of words that already look familiar: Haus, Hand, Wasser, Freund, singen, trinken. The genuinely hard parts are the four cases and long compound nouns, and neither of them matters on your first day. Most people who quit German quit because they met the grammar tables before they met the words.
With 15 to 20 focused minutes a day, most beginners reach A1 in roughly three to six months. What decides the pace is consistency rather than session length: five days of ten minutes will move you further than one ninety-minute session at the weekend.
Vocabulary first. Words let you understand something immediately, even in a broken sentence, while grammar with no vocabulary to apply it to has nothing to hold on to. Learn the first few hundred words, then add grammar to explain patterns you have already noticed. The longer answer, with the point where the balance shifts, is in vocabulary or grammar first.
Five to ten new words a day is a pace almost anyone can keep up, and it adds up to well over a thousand words in a year. The number that really matters is not how many you meet but how many you review, so keep the new-word count low enough that you still have time to go back over the old ones. How many words to learn per day explains why the ceiling is that low.
These six guides are language-neutral — they cover the method rather than the words, so they apply whichever language you are starting.
Every course begins at absolute beginner level.