The short answer: roughly 500 to 650 words. The official word list Goethe-Institut publishes for its Start Deutsch 1 exam contains about 650 entries, and the CEFR description of A1 points at a similar range.
That number surprises most people because it is far lower than expected. But A1 was never about a wide vocabulary. Its purpose is narrower and more practical: introduce yourself, express everyday needs, and respond when someone speaks to you. Six hundred words covers that comfortably.
Why so few?
Because at A1 what matters is not how many words you know but which words they are. The 500 most frequent German words make up a very large share of ordinary conversation. A handful of verbs — *sein, haben, gehen, machen, können, wollen* — is the backbone of nearly every sentence a beginner will need.
Meanwhile someone who has memorised 5,000 randomly chosen words but cannot conjugate those basic verbs cannot produce a single sentence. This is the most expensive mistake in language learning: many words, little use.
What the A1 list actually covers
Looking at the Goethe list, the words cluster around specific areas of life:
Personal information — name, age, country, job, family members. It is the first thing asked in the exam and the first thing asked in real life.
Numbers, time, dates — German numbers are regular and have few exceptions once learned. Telling the time (*halb*, *viertel*) needs separate practice because the logic differs from English: *halb drei* means half past two, not three.
Home and objects — rooms, furniture, kitchen items. This group is easy to memorise because the words are concrete.
Food, shopping, money — asking prices, stating quantities, paying. For anyone moving to Germany, these are the first week’s words.
Directions and transport — right, left, straight, stop, ticket. Without them you cannot move around a city alone.
Everyday verbs — get up, eat, work, sleep. Few in number, highest in use.
Never learn a noun without its article
There is one mistake at A1 that becomes very expensive later: memorising nouns without their article. Someone who learns “Tisch = table” will stall six months later when cases arrive, because in German the case does not change the noun itself — it changes the article: *der Tisch → den Tisch → dem Tisch.*
In other words, if you do not know the gender you cannot build the case. Done from day one this costs nothing extra. Done later it means relearning a thousand nouns. The rule is simple: write every noun with its article and revise it with its article.
There are also useful suffix patterns that let you predict gender; we cover them in the der, die, das guide.
How long does it take?
Goethe-Institut gives a range of roughly 80 to 200 teaching hours for A1. The range is wide for a real reason: it genuinely depends on whether you have learned a foreign language before, what your first language is, and how many hours a week you study.
A practical estimate: at 30 focused minutes a day, three to five months is realistic. At two hours a day, six to eight weeks. The decisive word is “regular” — one three-hour session a week is far weaker than thirty minutes daily, because vocabulary memory runs on spaced repetition rather than volume.
How many new words a day?
Eight to ten new words a day is the sustainable ceiling for most people. At that pace you reach 650 words in about ten weeks — and reach them without forgetting them.
Trying to memorise 40 a day appears to work for a week and collapses in the third. The cause is not willpower but the forgetting curve: a newly learned word decays sharply within days unless it is revisited. So every session should combine new words plus review of old ones.
LexUnio’s vocabulary cards use spaced repetition for exactly this reason: words you know come back rarely, words you struggle with come back often. Fifteen minutes a day is enough to keep fifty words alive.
Knowing words is not enough
The final and most important point: you do not pass A1 by counting words. What the exam and real life measure is whether you can build sentences with them. Someone who recognises five hundred words but has never spoken is not A1. Someone who can introduce themselves with three hundred is.
So learn every new word inside a sentence, never alone. Instead of “trinken”, memorise “Ich trinke Wasser”. For the same effort you get the word, the conjugation and the sentence structure.
Where to start
If you are starting German from zero, start at A1. If you have studied some German before, measure where you actually are first: the free German level test gives your CEFR level in thirty questions and needs no account.
After that, the German A1 page shows lesson by lesson what this level covers. If you are aiming at the exam, the Goethe A1 preparation page explains how each skill is tested.