Lingvist German course frequencies available now!

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Are you curious to know what words Lingvist teaches you? Interested in word frequencies? Look no further! Our users have told us that it would be helpful to know what words they will be learning and how frequent these words are in everyday language.

We have decided to make these statistics on the first 2000 words available to you. Below, you will find a word list for our German course with absolute word frequencies, as well as probabilities, which are a bit more informative, as they are normalized for the size of the corpus (in our case, 5,192,669,949 words – that’s more than 5 billion, in case you were having trouble making sense of this number).

So, what does this mean? If you pick a random word from anything you read or hear in German, there is a 0.029% chance that it will be the word “Leben.” By comparison, there is a nearly 2% chance that you will encounter the femine article “die.” It really pays off to learn a language roughly in the order of frequency, right?!

However, as you can see, our courses don’t strictly follow the order of frequency, as it would be pretty boring and meaningless to learn all the function words first (“der,” “ist,” “es”), and there would be no words with which to create sentences and meaning. Our courses are therefore ordered based not only on these frequencies, but also including word forms, age of acquisition, and the importance of the example sentences.

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Priority in Lingvist's general courseWordExample SentenceProbability that you will encounter this word in a German textAbsolute frequency of this word
1LebenDas Leben ist schön.0.0292%1530081
2Jahrdas Jahr 20180.0453%2377053
3Spieldas Spiel0.0170%893117
4schönDas Leben ist schön.0.0133%700040
5istDas Spiel ist neu.0.6833%35840439
6großDas Land ist groß.0.0092%483684
7ichich0.4132%21670732
8LandDas Land ist groß.0.0164%859501
9Fraudie Frau0.0179%937111
10Mannder Mann0.0147%768528
11unddie Frau und der Mann1.8767%98432060
12duich und du0.0776%4068929
13Bettdas Bett0.0036%187884
14hierDer neue Computer ist hier.0.0988%5180462
15Tagder Tag0.0299%1570032
16Weltdie Welt0.0275%1444600
17KindDas Kind ist groß.0.0093%490227
18SchokoladeFrauen lieben Schokolade.0.0011%55546
19dasdas Leben0.7964%41770626
20Computerder neue Computer0.0085%446562

Learn these words now with Lingvist’s superb spaced repetition and personalized algorithms that place you correctly in the course and teach you what you need to know.

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