How Many German Words Should You Learn per Day?

The number most people pick is the number they wish were true. Fifty words a day sounds like B2 by Christmas. In a spaced repetition system it is a debt with a fixed repayment plan, and the plan is not negotiable: every word you start today has to be reviewed about eight more times over the next six months.

So the useful question is not "how many words can I learn in a day" - on a good day, a hundred. It is "how many reviews am I willing to do every day for the next year", and then working backwards. The answer for most adults with a job is 10 to 15 new words a day. Here is the arithmetic.

One new word is about eight to ten reviews

Take a staircase of growing gaps: 4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, 2 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 4 months. That is the schedule merke.me uses, and most systems land close to it. A word that you get right every time passes eight reviews and is done after roughly six months.

Nobody gets every word right every time. A realistic accuracy is 85 to 90 percent, and each miss sends the word back one or two steps, which adds reviews. Averaged over a whole deck, one new word costs eight to ten reviews before it is permanent.

That gives the only formula you need:

daily reviews at steady state = new words per day x 8.5

Steady state arrives after about six months, when the words you started in week one are finishing just as today's words begin. Before that the load climbs week by week, and that climb is the trap: in week two, twenty new words a day feels easy.

What each daily number costs

Assume six to eight seconds per review, including the ones you have to think about.

Add the time for meeting the new words themselves - reading the entry, hearing it, looking at the example sentence - which is roughly a minute per word done properly.

Two things in this table surprise people. First, five words a day is not nothing: it is the whole A1 and A2 vocabulary in a year, for the time it takes to drink a coffee. Second, fifty a day is an hour of pure reviewing, every single day, with no day off, before you have read or spoken a word of German. People who start at fifty do not fail because they are lazy. They fail because that was never a plan.

How long each level takes at 10 a day

The official Goethe word lists hold about 650 words for A1, 1,300 for A2 and 2,400 for B1, each including the level below. Above B1 there are only estimates; we published ours, with the coverage figures behind them, in how many German words you need per level.

These are the dates on which you have started the last word. Count four to six more months until that last batch is truly settled. And vocabulary is one of several tracks: nobody passes B1 on words alone.

Start low and raise it once

The safest way to find your number:

1. Start at 10 new words a day. If you have less than fifteen minutes on a normal weekday, start at 5. 2. Hold it for four weeks without changing anything. The review load in week four is still only about half of what it will become. 3. Check two things: do your reviews finish in the time you set aside, and is your accuracy on reviews above 85 percent? 4. If both are yes, go to 15. Hold that for another month. Most people stop here.

Raising the number is easy. Lowering it after the pile has grown is the hard direction, because the reviews you already created keep arriving for months. That is why the first month should feel slightly too easy.

Signs that your number is too high

• Accuracy below 80 percent. You are not learning words faster, you are re-learning the same ones. Each miss adds reviews, so a too-high number raises the workload twice.
• You skip the new words to "catch up". Then the daily number on the screen is already fiction.
• You dread opening the app. This is a real signal, and the usual end of it is a month-long gap and 900 due cards. What to do then is covered in how to clear a review backlog.
• The same words keep coming back. A handful of stubborn words can make up a fifth of your daily reviews. They need a different treatment, not more repetitions - see why you keep forgetting German words.

Words you already know should not count

A daily limit is a budget for effort. A word like der Computer or das Hotel costs an English speaker nothing, and if your tool makes you click through it eight times, a tenth of your budget goes to words you knew before you started.

Good systems give you a way around that. In merke.me the lesson has an "I know this" button that takes a word out of the normal flow, and there is a placement test and a word check for people who are not beginners, so that an A2 learner does not wade through und and ich. In Anki, suspend or delete such cards without guilt. The goal is not to complete a deck. The goal is to spend each review on a word you would otherwise lose.

Grammar needs its own, smaller number

If you also review grammar on a schedule, treat it separately. A grammar topic is not one fact. Wechselpräpositionen - the prepositions that take accusative for movement and dative for position - is a rule plus nine prepositions plus the habit of applying it in real time. Two or three textbook topics a week is a serious pace; five a day is reading a grammar book and calling it learning.

How that translates into a daily number depends on how finely the grammar is cut. merke.me splits big topics into single decisions - one preposition with one case, one person of one tense - so its A1 grammar deck has about 170 small points instead of a few dozen chapters. One new point a day is a comfortable pace there and finishes A1 grammar in about six months, which matches how long A1 takes in an evening class. Every deck has its own "new per day" setting for exactly this reason: a vocabulary deck can run at 10 while the grammar deck of the same level runs at 1.

What "learn" should mean on day one

One last thing decides whether your daily number is honest. Scrolling past ten words is not learning ten words. A word counts as started when you have:

• seen it with its article and plural (die Wohnung, die Wohnungen),
• heard it once,
• read one sentence that uses it,
• and produced it once from memory a few minutes later.

That takes about a minute per word. Ten words is ten minutes of new material and ten of reviews. Twenty minutes a day, every day, is 3,650 words in a year - more than the whole B1 list. How to fit that into a day is laid out in the 30-minute German study plan.

If you want the schedule and the words handed to you, the decks are ordered by frequency so the first words you learn are the ones you will meet most, and the daily number is one setting per deck. The first 100 words and 30 grammar points are free; the rest is on the pricing page.