WunderDict turns the German words you actually meet into a review system that keeps them in your head. The loop is simple: look a word up, save it to a list, then let flash cards and quizzes bring it back at the right moments. This page walks through each step, and ends with a few habits that make the difference between a tool you open twice and one that quietly builds your vocabulary for months.
1. Look a word up — in German or English
Type into the search bar in either language. As you type, suggestions appear from words already in the dictionary, so you often do not need to finish. Submit and WunderDict classifies the word by part of speech and builds a full entry: the article and plural for a noun, the conjugation for a verb, example sentences, the CEFR level, and a translation into your chosen language.
You can paste a short phrase too (up to 250 characters). It is broken down into its individual words, each looked up on its own, so you can save the ones you want rather than a single throwaway translation.
Every lookup is cached, so the second time anyone searches that word the entry is richer, not slower.
2. Build word lists
A list is where saved words live. Create as many as you like — by topic, by lesson, by the book you are reading — rename them, and star the ones you use most. Within a list, words are grouped by part of speech, and each group shows the fields that matter for it: nouns show article and plural, verbs show their conjugation, and so on.
The same word can sit in several lists without being duplicated in the dictionary underneath, and deleting a list never deletes the cached word — only your reference to it.
If you would rather not start from a blank page, open one of the curated lists (for example the most common nouns or verbs) and it is copied into your account as your own, ready to edit.
You can build lists as a guest. Reviewing them — flash cards, quizzes and progress history — requires a free account, because that is where your per-word progress is stored.
3. Review with flash cards
Open the Practice menu on any list and choose Flash Cards. You see one side of a card, try to recall the other, then reveal it. This is exposure-only: it is the gentle first pass that nudges a word from new toward learning without grading you. Use it when a batch of words is still unfamiliar and you just want repeated contact.
4. Quiz yourself
The Translation Quiz is the version with teeth. It asks you to produce the answer and marks you right or wrong. That act of retrieval — pulling the word out of memory before you see it — is what actually cements it, far more than re-reading ever will.
As you answer, each word moves through three states:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| New | You have not really been tested on it yet. |
| Learning | Seen and in progress, not yet reliable. |
| Known | Recalled correctly several times in a row. |
Getting a word right a few times in a row marks it known; getting it wrong sends it back to be seen sooner. You do not have to track any of this — the list shows you the counts.
5. Let spaced repetition do the scheduling
This is the engine under the quizzes. Once a word is known, WunderDict waits before testing it again — first days, then a week, then longer — and stretches the interval every time you keep getting it right. Words you are shaky on come back quickly; words you have mastered stay out of the way. The result is that your review time lands almost entirely on the words that need it. You never build a review queue by hand.
6. Check yourself against real text
The Text Review tool takes a passage of German and highlights which words you already know, which you are learning, and which are new to you. It is a quick way to see your vocabulary against something authentic — a news article, a page of a book — and to spot the words worth adding to a list next.
Getting the most out of it
- Add words from things you actually read or watch. A word with a memory attached to it sticks; a random one does not. Save the example sentence, not just the translation.
- Keep sessions short and daily. Spaced repetition needs days to space across. Ten minutes every day beats an hour once a week.
- Quiz more than you re-read. When you can choose, choose the mode that makes you recall.
- Set your language once, in the header. The language switcher drives both the interface and the translation language for every list, so your reviews are always in the language you think in.
WunderDict is deliberately just the vocabulary half of learning German — and it is good at it. For where it fits in the bigger picture (and why memorising words alone will not get you fluent), read why use WunderDict. For the grammar itself, start with the guides.