Spaced Repetition Before a German Exam: A 12-Week Countdown

Spaced repetition is designed for people with no deadline. It moves each word further into the future until you hold it for life. An exam turns that around: you do not need die Voraussetzung in 2029, you need it on a Saturday morning in twelve weeks, together with 2,399 other words, under time pressure.

The method still works better than anything else for exam vocabulary. It needs to be run differently. This plan assumes about twelve weeks, a B1 exam (Goethe, telc, ÖSD or the DTZ), and 30 to 40 minutes a day for vocabulary and grammar review. For A2 or B2 the shape is the same and the numbers change.

Three things a deadline changes

New words have a last useful day. A word started three days before the exam has had three reviews. It will feel known and will not survive the stress of the exam room. A word needs roughly three weeks and five or six reviews to be reliable. So there is a date after which adding new words costs more than it gives.

Long intervals work against you at the end. A word you got right in week 3 might be scheduled for week 20. That is correct for lifelong learning and useless for a test in week 12. In the final weeks you want to see everything once more, including what the schedule thinks is safe.

Cramming becomes legitimate. Massed repetition produces a memory that lasts days. Normally that is a waste. Three days before an exam, a memory that lasts days is exactly what is needed for the shaky remainder. Cram at the end, on top of the schedule, never in place of it.

Work out your numbers first

The official B1 word list has about 2,400 entries, including A1 and A2. The Goethe-Institut publishes the A1, A2 and B1 lists as free PDFs, and they are what the people who set the exam work from.

Find out how many of those you already know. Be strict: knowing means producing the word with its article, not recognising it. Then:

new words per day = words still unknown / days until the cut-off

The cut-off is three weeks before the exam. With twelve weeks, that leaves nine weeks or 63 days of adding.

If you land in the last row, cut. Learn the words in frequency order and accept that the rare 400 stay unknown. Understanding 85 percent of the list well beats half-knowing all of it. If you are unsure where you stand, a placement test takes a few minutes.

Weeks 12 to 9: build the base

• Start new words at your daily number, every day, including weekends.
• Do every review on the day it is due. In these weeks the intervals are short (hours, then one and two days) and missing a day undoes the early steps.
• Add grammar at two to three points a week. For B1 the ones that cost marks are subordinate clauses with the verb at the end, the Perfekt and Präteritum of common verbs, adjective endings, the passive, and Konjunktiv II for polite requests. See weil, dass, obwohl and Konjunktiv II.
• Learn nouns with article and plural from day one. In the writing part, a wrong article is a visible error in every sentence it appears in.

Weeks 8 to 4: the heavy middle

This is where the review load peaks and where most plans break. Words from week 12 are coming back at one and two weeks, new words are still arriving, and the daily pile is at its largest.

• Reviews before new words, always. If time is short, skip the new words, never the reviews.
• Switch to production. If you have been reviewing German to English, turn the direction around or start typing. The writing and speaking parts need words you can produce.
• Start the fixed phrases. B1 writing is a letter or an email and an opinion text; speaking includes planning something together. All three run on set phrases: Ich würde vorschlagen, dass ..., Meiner Meinung nach ..., Vielen Dank für Ihre Nachricht. Put thirty of these on cards. They are cheap marks.
• Add one timed model test in week 6. Not for the score. To find out which part is weakest while there is time to react. What the parts look like is in the Goethe-Zertifikat B1 guide.

Weeks 3 to 2: stop adding

Three weeks out, set new words to zero. This feels wrong and is the most important step in the plan.

• The daily review pile now shrinks, because nothing new is feeding it. Use the freed time for model tests.
• Every word you miss in a model test goes on a short list. That list, not the big word list, is your new material now. Twenty to forty words from real exam texts are worth more than 200 from the tail of the list.
• Look at your trouble words: the ones that have failed four or more times. There will be forty to eighty. Go through them in one sitting and sort them: confused with a twin, missing article, never really learned. How to repair each kind is in why you keep forgetting the same German words.

The last week: cram on top

Now the long intervals are the problem. Words you learned well in week 11 are scheduled for after the exam.

• Run through everything once, outside the schedule. In Anki that is a filtered deck; in merke.me it is the cram mode, which lets you practise any deck or just your weak entries without touching their due dates.
• Two passes of the weak list each day: morning and evening.
• Keep doing the normal reviews. They take ten minutes by now.
• The day before: one light pass in the morning, then stop. Sleep does more for recall than the last forty cards.

What flashcards do not cover

Vocabulary is a condition for passing, not the exam itself. Roughly:

Writing needs someone to correct your texts, and speaking needs someone to speak with. A tutor for the last six weeks, even once a week, is the best money you can spend next to a vocabulary system. Listening is covered in how to improve your German listening. And if you are still choosing between exam boards, read telc, Goethe or ÖSD.

After the exam

Here the method pays a second time. The 2,400 words are on a schedule that now stretches to months. Ten minutes a day keeps all of them, and the exam was not a peak followed by forgetting, which is what happens to almost everyone who crams. If B2 is next, carry on from where the list ended.

Doing this with merke.me

The Goethe word lists for A1, A2 and B1 are in merke.me as their own decks, next to the frequency decks, with article, plural, example sentences and audio on every entry. The daily number is a setting per deck, so the calculation above is one field. The B1 grammar deck runs in the same queue. The cut-off is simply setting "new per day" to zero three weeks out, and cram mode covers the final week.

You can read the entries in the vocabulary and the grammar in the library now; 100 words and 30 grammar points are free, and for a full exam run you will need the subscription on the pricing page. We do not correct your writing or hold a speaking exam with you - that part needs a person.