Goethe-Zertifikat A2 Vocabulary List (Elementary German)

Goethe-Zertifikat A2 covers everyday German: routines, the Perfekt for finished events, shopping, travel, health and preferences. It is the level where word order stops being forgiving, where the dative appears throughout ordinary speech, and where modal verbs carry much of the meaning.

For candidates preparing Goethe-Zertifikat A2. Maps to CEFR A2.

About Goethe A2

Goethe-Zertifikat A2 covers everyday German: routines, the Perfekt for finished events, shopping, travel, health and preferences. It is the level where word order stops being forgiving, where the dative appears throughout ordinary speech, and where modal verbs carry much of the meaning.

Who this list is for

Goethe-Zertifikat A2 suits learners who can describe their day and recount a trip in simple sentences, and it appears in some German residence procedures. It is a realistic level for people who moved to Germany and picked the language up around them without formal study.

How to study

Learn verbs together with the case they govern, helfen with the dative, since the case is not predictable from meaning and getting it wrong is what marks a sentence as foreign. Review Perfekt forms as whole sentences rather than as participle lists, because the auxiliary choice between haben and sein is part of the item. Listen daily; spoken German compresses in ways the written form hides.

The list (1246 words)

Some example sentences come from the Tatoeba Project (tatoeba.org), CC BY 2.0 FR. The rest were written for MindDory. Tatoeba, CC BY 2.0 FR.

Where do the words after this list come from?

A list has an end. The words you keep for good usually turn up somewhere else — in a page you read, a show you watched, or a conversation you had — one at a time, and rarely at the level you planned for.

MindDory connects to Claude, Cursor, and other assistants that speak the Model Context Protocol, so a word you meet while you are chatting is saved to your deck as a flashcard without you leaving the conversation. There is no copy and paste, no CSV export, and no browser extension.

How the assistant connection works

Choosing an app