Dokken: the German test taken in Japan, level by level

Most German exams an English speaker has heard of are European: Goethe, telc, TestDaF. In Japan the exam people actually sit is a domestic one, and it is organised differently enough that advice written for Goethe does not transfer cleanly.

What the Dokken is

The Diplom Deutsch in Japan, known everywhere as Dokken, is the German proficiency test administered in Japan. It has six grades, counted downwards: 5-kyu is the entry level and 1-kyu the highest, with pre-1-kyu sitting between 2-kyu and 1-kyu.

The part that makes it unusually easy to prepare for is that the organisers publish, for every grade, a target vocabulary size and a study-hour estimate. Most European exams describe what you should be able to do; the Dokken also tells you roughly how many words that takes.

Those are the official figures from the exam's own level description. Treat the study hours as what they are: an average over people who sit in a class twice a week, not a promise.

Why the numbers are more useful than they look

A vocabulary target is only actionable if you know which words. "3,000 words" is not a list, and the difference between the right 3,000 and an arbitrary 3,000 is enormous.

This is where frequency does the work. German, like every language, is extremely top-heavy: a few hundred function words and high-frequency verbs carry most of an ordinary page, and the return per word learned falls steeply as you go further down the list. So the sensible reading of the table is not "memorise 3,000 items" but "cover the first 3,000 words by frequency, in order".

That reading also explains the gaps between grades. Going from 4-kyu to 3-kyu is a thousand words, and those particular thousand are still common enough to appear on nearly every page you read. Going from 2-kyu to pre-1-kyu is two thousand, and those are rarer, which is exactly why the study-hour estimate stops being a number and becomes "several years".

What the table does not tell you

Three honest caveats.

A word is not one item. Der Tisch is a word; der Tisch, die Tische with the gender attached is what the exam expects. Counting the article and the plural as part of the word roughly doubles the memory load of every noun, and it is the single most common reason a learner who "knows 2,000 words" cannot produce a correct sentence.

Grammar is graded separately. The level descriptions expect the basic grammar in full by 3-kyu, and 2-kyu assumes solid knowledge of both grammar and vocabulary. A pure word count will not carry you past 4-kyu.

The official past papers are the authority. If you want the precise scope of a grade, the exam's own publications and past papers are the source. This page is about the order in which to learn, not a substitute for them.

The order that works

• Learn by frequency, not by theme. A themed list of forty animal names feels productive and returns almost nothing; the first thousand words return more comprehension per hour than the tenth thousand ever will.
• Learn every noun with its article and its plural, from the first day. Retrofitting gender onto 2,000 nouns you already half-know is miserable work.
• Review on a schedule instead of by mood. Vocabulary decays predictably, which is the only reason spaced repetition works at all.
• Read the word in a sentence. An isolated gloss survives a flashcard and collapses in a reading comprehension task.

Where this site fits

We should be upfront that we built it, so read accordingly.

The vocabulary here is ordered by frequency and split into bands of a thousand, so the Dokken table maps onto it directly: band 1 is roughly 4-kyu's thousand words, bands 1 to 2 cover 3-kyu, bands 1 to 3 cover 2-kyu, bands 1 to 5 cover pre-1-kyu. Every noun carries its article and plural, and every entry has example sentences with translations. The grammar library has 480 points from A1 to C2 on the same review schedule.

You can read all of it without an account. If you already know a good deal of German, the placement test finds the level to start at instead of making you walk through material you know.

Tools people use for this

Anki is free, flexible and genuinely good if you enjoy building your own system; we wrote an honest comparison of where it wins and where it costs you time. Quizlet is quicker to start and weaker at long intervals. General course apps explain something once and move on, which is the failure mode this exam punishes most. There is a wider survey of the options if you want to compare before committing.