German Vocabulary Practice from A1 to C2

German vocabulary is not one list you finish. The words that get you through an A1 form are the wrong words to be drilling if you are trying to follow a C1 argument, and the reverse is also true: a C1 noun does not help you buy a ticket if the A1 phrase is not available under pressure. Practice only works when the bank is shaped like the level you are actually in.

My Path's General German test treats vocabulary as its own skill, across CEFR A1 to C2, inside a four-skill grid that also has grammar, reading, and writing. This article is the vocabulary slice: what level-shaped vocab means, how mastery on the Education hub records it, and how to sit it without turning the week into flashcards that never meet a sentence. The product overview is German practice test: CEFR A1 to C2.

Level-shaped vocabulary, not a giant word dump

A CEFR band is a claim about what you can do. Vocabulary at that band is the lexicon those tasks actually use. A1 is high-frequency, concrete, and repetitive: people, time, food, travel, the verbs you cannot avoid. A2 adds the small machinery of everyday life — more functions, more of the closed class, still tied to familiar situations. B1 is the band where the words start to carry opinion, reason, and simple abstraction. B2 expects range: you can talk about a topic you have not rehearsed as a script. C1 and C2 are precision, register, and the ability to choose among near-synonyms instead of reaching for the one noun you trust.

If you mix those bands in one sitting, a high score can mean you knew the A1 items and guessed the C1 items. That score is useless as a plan. My Path therefore sits one Level at a time. The control is labelled Level, not Grade. Multi-band pools are refused. The same constraint is argued for maths on why grade bands matter in practice: you cannot interpret a percentage until you know the band.

You will not get a published list of every lemma in the German vocabulary cell, and this article will not invent counts inside the ~576-item bank. What you get is a skill filter that draws vocabulary items at the band you named. That is enough to train, and it is honest about what we are measuring.

Frequency still matters inside a band. High-frequency words at B1 are still worth more of your week than a rare technical noun you saw once. The sitting will not always agree with your sense of what is "useful." When it asks for a word you think is boring, that is often the word that is load-bearing. Train it.

Vocabulary as a skill, not as a side effect of reading

You do pick up words from reading. You do not get a clean measurement that way. A reading sitting lets you survive a hole in the lexicon if the rest of the passage is kind. A vocabulary sitting does not. The item is there to ask whether the word, the collocation, or the function is available.

That is why the skill filter exists. Use reading to meet words in context. Use vocabulary to retrieve them without the surrounding paragraph doing half the work. Use grammar when the miss is the article or the ending rather than the stem. German makes this distinction sharper than English does, because a "vocabulary miss" is often a stem you knew with a case ending you did not. If the options differ by ending, you are adjacent to grammar; if they differ by lemma or by meaning, you are in vocabulary. Review the item, do not argue with the filter.

Writing items, when you draw them, will show whether a word you can recognise is a word you can produce. Recognition scores run high. Production is the one that fails in a message to a landlord. Vocabulary sittings on a multiple-choice platform will lean toward recognition. Compensate by saying the word aloud or writing it once when you review a miss, even though the sitting itself has no speaking paper and no audio.

How to sit vocabulary on the hub

Open General German from Education. Set Level to one CEFR band. Set the skill to vocabulary. Then set the session.

Size is 10, 20, or 60. Default 20. Vocabulary items are usually faster than reading items, so 10 is a genuine probe you can do when you have a few minutes, and 60 is a volume sitting that is actually finishable. Use 10 to check a band. Use 20 as the comparable weekly session. Use 60 when the wrong pile from 20 has gotten small and you want more coverage at the same band.

Timer: off while you are still unsure of the band, relaxed when you want a little pressure, exam mode when you want to know whether the word is available fast. Vocabulary under a clock is closer to the way you need it in a sentence. If you only ever sit untimed, you will overestimate what you can retrieve when you are also trying to finish a clause.

Feedback immediate versus at the end: immediate is a tutor. At the end is a test. For vocabulary, immediate feedback is easy to overuse because each item is short and the tick is satisfying. Mix in end-of-sitting papers so you discover which words you only knew because the previous item's answer was still on the screen.

Navigation free or forward-only is less critical here than in reading, but flag still matters. Flag the items where two options both felt possible. Those are the near-synonyms and the false friends. Skip ("I don't know") rather than building a story around a word you do not have. A skip is a clean miss you can retry. A lucky guess is a lie in your score.

The topic filter is a closed list. Use it when you want a thinner slice of the band's vocabulary. Leave it wide for a diagnostic mix. Do not expect it to become a custom deck for your job unless that topic is in the list. Unclassified wishful thinking is not a filter option.

Review, retry, and the difference between a miss and a hole

After the sitting: score, correct, wrong, skipped. Retry wrong is the core vocabulary move. Seeing the same decision again the same day is retrieval, which is what actually stores the word. Rereading a list of the words you missed, without a prompt, is closer to the fluency illusion — it feels like study and often is not.

Retry flagged is for the almosts. If you were choosing between two nouns and happened to be right, that word is not learned. Put it in the next sitting's attention by retrying the flag pile.

A full retake is a new draw at the same settings, or a clean paper after you change a setting. Do not grind the same 20 items until you have memorised option order. Item memory is not vocabulary. New sitting, same band, same skill: that is how coverage grows inside the ~576-item German bank without pretending we have printed a frequency dictionary.

AI gap analysis can cluster misses if you have the Education entitlement and tokens. Use it to notice a pattern — perhaps function words, perhaps a topic — then sit that pattern. Do not treat the paragraph as a replacement for the retry.

When you review a miss, look at one extra thing German learners skip: gender and plural for nouns, auxiliary for verbs, preposition that the verb actually takes. A word whose gender you do not have is a word you will miss again on a grammar sitting. You do not need to turn every vocabulary item into a grammar lecture. You do need to stop storing nouns as English glosses with no article.

Mastery on the hub

The Education hub keeps a per-topic mastery bar, with complexity levels 1–5 and a streak if you sit regularly. Topic master is at 80% mastery. That bar is the vocabulary product as much as the sitting is. It is how "I did some German" becomes "B1 vocabulary on this topic is at 80%" or is not.

Read the bars at one band. A high bar on an A2 topic does not mean C1 is done. If you change Level, you are looking at a different cell. That is the whole point of the grid.

Badges exist — first lesson, perfect score, 7-day streak, topic master, exam ready, polyglot — and they are fine as a nudge. They are a bad target. Chasing a streak with 10-item sittings you do not review produces a badge and a lexicon that has not moved. Chase the wrong pile getting shorter at a named band.

If a topic bar will not move, the usual causes are honest: you are sitting too high a band, you are never retrying wrong, or you are only sitting mixed German so the topic never gets enough volume. Narrow the filter, drop a band, retry. If it still will not move, sit the same topic in reading and see whether the words appear in context; some learners store words from passages who cannot store them from isolated items, and the reverse is also true.

A week of vocabulary that does not eat the other skills

Vocabulary is the easy skill to over-drill because the items are short. Do not let it replace grammar and reading. A word you can pick in a list and cannot use in a subordinate clause is a half-word.

A pattern that holds: three short vocabulary sittings in a week at your living band (10 or 20), one grammar sitting, one reading sitting, same Level throughout. If you only have two sittings in you, make them vocabulary and reading, not vocabulary twice. Reading is where the words have to survive syntax.

If you are maintaining another language on the same hub, keep the bands honest per language. English, Spanish, and French use the same skill grid. A B2 English vocabulary bar does not pay for B2 German.

What this will not do

My Path is not the Goethe-Institut, not ÖSD, and not a publisher of an official word list for those exams. We are not affiliated with them. Abitur is not available. A vocabulary sitting will not certify you for a visa, a job, or a degree. It will tell you whether the words at this CEFR band are available on our items.

There is no listening vocabulary and no speaking vocabulary as separate papers. Words you can only recognise in audio, or only produce when talking, are outside the measurement. If that is your gap, add audio elsewhere. Do not conclude from a written vocabulary score that you will follow fast German on a train platform.

Do not expect the bank to be your only input. A ~576-item German grid across four skills and six levels is a practice object, not a dictionary of the language. Read, listen, and use German between sittings. Then sit, so the words have to come back without the podcast playing.

Plans

Vocabulary practice is Education. Only Student and Monthly include it. Student is €9.99/month, no trial — Get Student — €9.99/month — unlimited Education. Monthly is €19.99/month with a 7-day trial at €1.99. For Me and Around Me include zero Education. GBP and PLN mirrors exist. Walkthroughs: Student plan, Education on My Path. The click-by-click sitting is learn German with practice tests.

Name a band and sit it

Pick the CEFR level you are actually living in, not the one on a course you hope to join. Set skill to vocabulary. Default 20 is enough. When you finish, retry wrong the same day, then leave the words alone until the next sitting. That spacing is doing more work than a third pass in the same hour.

Open Education and sit one Level. See plans if you still need Student or Monthly.