5,009 words · A1 → C1 · the most complete free German Anki deck
Native neural audio · 2,369 images · Full verb conjugations · Goethe level badges · Word families · Mobile-ready
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Get the latest .apkg from the Releases page, then in Anki: File → Import.
Works on Anki desktop (Windows/macOS/Linux), AnkiDroid (Android), and AnkiMobile (iOS).
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| 🔊 Word audio | Microsoft KatjaNeural TTS — every one of 5,009 words |
| 🔊 Sentence audio | All 5,112 example sentences spoken naturally — train your listening |
| 🖼️ Images | 2,369 nouns visualised (English-meaning matched to disambiguate Bank/bench etc.) |
| 📖 Verb conjugations | All 1,246 verbs with full present tense, Präteritum and Perfekt — separable prefixes underlined |
| 🎯 Goethe level badges | Every card tagged A1 / A2 / B1 / B2+ |
| 👨👩👧 Word families | 1,790 cards show related words (e.g. arbeiten → die Arbeit, der Arbeiter, arbeitslos) |
| 🎨 Gender colours | der blue · die red · das green — both in headers and example borders |
| 📝 IPA pronunciation | Bundled Charis SIL font ensures it renders correctly on every device, even offline AnkiDroid |
| 🌗 Dark mode | Full first-class dark mode support |
| 📊 Frequency rank | Every card shows its corpus frequency (#1 = most common) |
| 🔄 German → English | Active recall direction (forces real retrieval, not passive recognition) |
| ⇄ Production card (Card 2) | EN → DE for every A1/A2/B1 note (B2+ auto-suspended). Closes the speaking gap. |
| 🏷️ CEFR tags | tag:A1 · tag:A2 · tag:B1 · tag:B2plus for instant filtered decks |
[A1] ← Goethe level
der — maskulin ← gender label
der Hund ← word (color = gender)
Pl. -e ← plural form
[hʊnt] ← IPA (Charis SIL)
▶ ← audio auto-plays
WAS BEDEUTET DAS? ← prompt
┌──────────────────────┐
│ │
│ [photo of a │ ← image (nouns only)
│ dog] │
│ │
└──────────────────────┘
NOUN dog
┌────────────────────────────────┐
│ ▶ Mein Hund ist mein bester │ ← German example +
│ Freund. │ sentence audio
│ My dog is my best friend. │ ← English translation
└────────────────────────────────┘
┌─── Konjugation (verbs only) ──────────┐
│ ich bringe │ wir bringen │
│ du bringst │ ihr bringt │
│ er/sie bringt │ sie bringen │
│ │
│ Prät. ich brachte │ Perf. habe gebracht│
└───────────────────────────────────────┘
┌─── Wortfamilie ─────────────────────┐
│ die Arbeit · der Arbeiter · arbeitslos │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘
#287 most frequent
The deck is sorted by real-world frequency (corpus-based). The Goethe levels are layered on top, so you can study sequentially:
| Cards | Goethe Level | What it unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| First 655 | A1 | Survive in Germany (greetings, numbers, basic food/transport) |
| +590 | A2 | Manage daily life (shopping, simple opinions, past tense) |
| +1,826 | B1 | Pass the Goethe-Zertifikat B1 exam — the bar for the German Blue Card |
| +1,938 | B2 / C1 | Read newspapers, watch TV without subtitles, professional fluency |
Cumulative: A1+A2 = 1,245 cards · A1+A2+B1 = 3,071 cards · all levels = 5,009 cards. Recommended pace: 20 new cards/day = B1 in ~5 months, full deck in ~9 months.
Active recall: a second card type (English → German) is generated for all A1+A2+B1 notes (3,071 production cards). B2+ production cards are auto-suspended on import — unsuspend them as you advance.
This isn't a hand-crafted deck. Every enrichment was generated programmatically from the original frequency word list. The pipeline:
┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ORIGINAL: 5,009 frequency words │
│ (Hermit Dave / OpenSubtitles) │
└─────────────────┬───────────────────┘
│
┌─────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┐
▼ ▼ ▼
┌─────────┐ ┌─────────────┐ ┌────────────┐
│ AUDIO │ │ IMAGES │ │ GRAMMAR │
├─────────┤ ├─────────────┤ ├────────────┤
│ edge-tts│ │ Wikipedia │ │ Rule-based │
│ Katja │ │ (English) │ │ derivation │
│ Neural │ │ + Openverse │ │ from deck │
└────┬────┘ │ + Wikimedia │ │ data │
│ │ Commons │ └─────┬──────┘
│ └──────┬──────┘ │
│ │ ▼
│ │ ┌────────────┐
│ │ │ LEVELS │
│ │ ├────────────┤
│ │ │ Goethe A1 │
│ │ │ A2/B1 lists│
│ │ │ + manual │
│ │ │ overrides │
│ │ └─────┬──────┘
▼ ▼ ▼
10,121 MP3s 2,369 JPGs 1,246 conj
(5009 words + (resized 300px, tables +
5112 sentences) quality 75) 5009 levels
│ │ │
└─────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Anki add-on injects everything │
│ into notes via the Python API: │
│ fields, templates, CSS, audio refs │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
✨ Final deck (162 MB)
See build/README.md for full reproducibility — every script is included.
- Concurrent TTS generation: 5112 sentences via
edge-tts+asynciosemaphore (15 workers) — full audio set built in ~3 minutes - Hybrid image source: Tried German Wikipedia first → fell back to Openverse with the English meaning to avoid polysemy errors (
Bankcould mean bank OR bench — usingdef1=bankreturns the right image) - Direct protobuf manipulation: Anki 2.1.50+ stores card templates as protobufs in the SQLite DB. Built a manual encoder/decoder rather than ship the heavy
google.protobufdependency - Conjugation derivation: Avoided rate-limited Wiktionary scraping by parsing conjugations directly from the deck's own
Wordfield ("fahren, fährt, fuhr, ist gefahren"→ 6 present tense forms via rules + irregular verb table) - Bundled IPA font: Charis SIL
.woff2(130 KB) with_prefix so Anki preserves it during media checks — fixes "NO GLYPH" rendering on AnkiDroid
| Other "5000 German Words" decks | This deck |
|---|---|
| English → German (passive recognition) | German → English (active recall) |
| Audio for words only, or none | Audio for words AND every example sentence |
| Plain text on cards | Gender colour coding, level badges, IPA, plural |
| No conjugations | Full conjugation table for all 1,246 verbs |
| No images, or random ones | 2,369 images sourced from English meaning to avoid wrong matches |
| Broken on mobile (IPA "NO GLYPH") | Bundled font, works offline on every device |
Found a wrong image? A conjugation mistake? Want to add B2 vocabulary?
- Open an issue describing the change
- Or fork → fix → PR — for image swaps you can drop replacement files in
media/and updateimage_map.json
The whole build pipeline is reproducible from build/ so anyone can regenerate the deck from scratch.
- Deck content (this version): MIT — free to use, modify, redistribute
- Original word list: frequency-sorted German lemmas from OpenSubtitles via Hermit Dave (CC-BY-SA)
- Audio: Microsoft Edge neural TTS (KatjaNeural — German, female, natural)
- Images: Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons / Openverse (all CC-licensed)
- IPA font: Charis SIL by SIL International (free for any use)
- Goethe word lists: ilkermeliksitki/goethe-institute-wordlist (parsed from official Goethe Institut PDFs)
Built by a learner, for learners. Viel Erfolg beim Lernen 🇩🇪