German in the Suneung: Korea's second foreign language paper

Korea's university entrance exam, the Suneung, includes an optional second foreign language section, and German is one of the subjects in it. It is a small paper with an unusually favourable scoring rule, which is why it is worth understanding before deciding whether to sit it.

The shape of the paper

The second foreign language and classical Chinese section offers nine subjects, German I among them, and you choose exactly one. The paper is thirty questions in forty minutes, scored out of fifty: ten questions worth one point and twenty worth two.

It is graded on an absolute scale. Since the 2022 intake the result is reported as a grade band only, without a standard score or a percentile, which means you are measured against a fixed threshold rather than against everyone else who sat the same paper. In the first year of absolute grading, German produced the highest share of top-band results of all the second foreign languages, at just over eleven per cent.

The section is optional. Whether it helps you depends entirely on the university, the faculty and the admission track, so that is the first thing to check, before any vocabulary list.

From the 2028 intake the paper shrinks to twenty questions in thirty minutes. If you are preparing now, prepare for the paper you will actually sit, and take past papers from the longer format as practice material rather than as a template.

What it actually tests

The scope is the school curriculum, not a European framework level, and the paper is built around communicative situations rather than grammar drills for their own sake: greetings and introductions, daily routines, shopping, directions, school, family, travel, and some cultural knowledge about German-speaking countries. Vocabulary is bounded by the curriculum's basic word list, which is a genuinely short list by the standards of language exams.

That has one important consequence. The scope is small enough to finish. Unlike Goethe or TestDaF, where "more vocabulary" is always the right answer, here there is a defined end to the material, and the winning strategy is to cover it completely rather than deeply.

Where the points are actually lost

Three places, in our experience of what learners get wrong in exactly this kind of paper:

Articles and case endings. A question that looks like vocabulary is often testing whether you know that it is dem Mann and not den Mann. If you learned the noun without its gender, every such question is a coin flip.

Word order. German puts the finite verb second in a main clause and last in a subordinate clause, and a surprising number of multiple-choice items turn on that alone.

Near-identical options. Exams of this type like distractors that differ by one letter or one ending. Recognising a word is not enough; you have to have produced it at some point.

The efficient order

• Learn every noun as article + noun + plural, one item, from the first day. Almost everything else in German hangs off gender.
• Learn the verbs before the nouns. A few dozen high-frequency verbs plus the modal verbs cover most of what the paper asks you to understand.
• Do not learn alphabetically or by theme alone. Frequency first, then fill the exam's themed lists, which are short.
• Review on a schedule. A list read three times in May is gone by November, and the exam is in November.

English helps more than you expect

German and English are close relatives, and for a Korean student who has already spent years on English this is a real asset. Hand, Finger, Name, Wind, Wasser, Haus, Buch, Garten, Sommer, Winter, bringen, singen, trinken, kommen need almost no memorisation, only a pronunciation rule and an article.

The trap is the small set of words that look English and are not: bekommen means to receive, not to become; also means therefore, not as well; Gift means poison. There are not many of them, but examiners love them. We keep a list of the common false friends.

Where this site fits

We built it, so read accordingly. The vocabulary is ordered by frequency, every noun carries its article and plural, and every entry has example sentences with translations, which is the format that survives a multiple-choice paper. The grammar library has 480 points from A1 to C2, each with an explanation and worked examples, and they go on the same review schedule as the words.

There is also a setting that puts the English-like words first, which for this paper is exactly the right order to start in: it front-loads the part you already half know and leaves the genuinely new vocabulary for later. Everything is readable without an account.