Goethe Institute A1 Wordlist

About this Deck

This is the Goethe Institute's A1 wordlist (including example sentences), translated into English, using double-sided cards and machine-generated audio. The original document is available here as a PDF. This deck is maintained in a public GitHub repository here.

I translated the words and sentences personally, and a professional German->English translator proofread the results. Both of us are native English speakers, so there are unlikely to be errors, but we are only human.

How it was created.

I created this deck by opening the wordlist document and exporting the list of words and associated example sentences. This was not a scripted process, and involved quite a lot of spreadsheet and text editor adjustments to get things into a reasonable state.

I included the additional snippets of vocabulary that appear before the list proper, but without example sentences since none were provided. This extra vocabulary is primarily colours, months, days, numbers, units, and other elementary concepts that will likely be useful. These do not have any audio, as the TTS does not handle the plural notation gracefully. The Advanced Browser plugin was invaluable for finding these entries when adding the audio.

The audio was created automatically by google cloud using the AwesomeTTS (Google Cloud Text-to-Speech)[unofficial] plugin with the "German (de-DE-German-Wavenet-A)" setting, which saved me a tremendous amount of work, and saved everyone else from having to listen to my voice :)

Finally, I used the Add note id plugin to add ids to the notes in case I need to make future corrections.

Card format

The front of each card is a german word with an example sentence. Verbs are provided in the infinitive and nouns with their definite articles. The back of each card is a translation of the german word and example sentence. Some cards have an additional comment to clarify the context, for instance, indicating if a colleague is male or female.

Note that sometimes there are set phrases in which transating the word directly does not make sense. In such cases the word is not translated, but an ellipsis ('...') is given in place of the word's translation.

Where a word has multiple translations and sample sentences, these were split into individual notes. This avoids a word having only one translation, which may not appear in the translated sample sentence (without it being a tortured rephrasing).

Deviations from the Goethe Institute

Some of the sentences from the Goethe Institute were not brilliant example of the use of a word in context - for instance, "Platz" had an example of "I wohne am Messeplatz 5.". However, since addresses are not translated, this would not have been a useful sentence to translate, so I changed it to "Ich wohne neben dem Platz."

There are a small number of modifications of this nature, or instance, where I have added an additional sentence to distinguish between two common usages of a word. These cases are listed below:

Replacement: "Herr Ober, kann ich bitte Salz haben?" replaced with "Entschuldigung, kann ich bitte das Salz haben?" after feedback from a native German speaker ("Herr Ober is an outdated way of addressing a waiter at a restaurant.").
Replacement: "Haben Sie Telefon?" replaced with "Haben Sie ein Telefon?" following feedback from a native German speaker.
Replacement: "Hören Sie die Ansagen." replaced with "Hören Sie auf die Ansagen." following feedback from a native German speaker.
Replacement: "Ich wohne Messeplatz 5." replaced with "Ich wohne neben dem Platz." - since addresses are not translated, this would not demonstrate the noun "Platz".
Replacement: "einmal" replaced with "noch einmal" to better fit the example sentence.
Replacement: "bei" -> "bei uns" to better fit the example sentence.
Replacement: "kulturell" -> "kulturell interessiert" to better fit the example sentence.
Replacement: "Zahlen, bitte!" -> "Wir möchten zahlen, bitte!" to ensure the word "pay" is used in the sentence.
Replacement: "8.00 Uhr" -> "8:00 Uhr" to allow the text-to-speach to speak as expected.
Replacement: "Wir müssen jetzt Schluss machen. Also auf Wiederhören!" -> "Auf Wiederhören!" - to match the example of "Auf Wiedersehen!"
New: "Ich wasche mich morgens." - to indicate the reflexive form of waschen.
New: "Er arbeitet mit Vorsicht." - the sentence was meant to demonstrate the noun "Vorsicht", but there is a difference between "Vorsicht" as "caution" or "attention" and the exclamatory "Vorsicht!" ("Watch out!" or "Careful!").
New: "Die Geschichte ist kulturell wichtig." - illustrates meaning of "kulturell" in isolation, as opposed to "kulturell interessiert".
New: "Das Glas ist kaputt." -> illustrates meaning of "kaputt" in insolation, as opposed to "kaputt gehen".
New: "Sie dürfen diese Prüfung nur einmal machen." -> to illustrate the meaning of "einmal" instead of "noch einmal".
New: "dort" -> separate entries for "dort", "dorther" and "dorthin".
New: "sich ausziehen" -> to clarify when "sich" should be added to "ausziehen"
New: "Ich mag das Buch." -> so that "das" has a translation to "the" (not just "that") in line with "der" and "die"

Last words

I hope this deck is useful. If you find any errors then please let me know by either creating an issue on the github page or emailing ankistuff@ethernull.org and I'll take a look. Before you email though, please consider whether what is already in the deck is an equally valid (albeit alternative) translation. In such cases I would not update the deck, as adding a second sample sentence would reduce format consistency and make the note less accessible for users who are just getting started.