You passed B1, and you can hold a conversation. Then you start on the ward and half of what people say is vocabulary no course covered: the word for the handover, the verb for "to administer," the name of the form the doctor wants. General German got you here. Ward German is a different, smaller set, and the good news is it is finite.
Here is that core, grouped by where it comes up on a shift.
Places and people
| German | English |
|---|---|
| das Krankenhaus | hospital |
| die Station | ward |
| die Notaufnahme | emergency room |
| die Pflegekraft / der Pfleger / die Krankenschwester | nurse (staff / male / female) |
| der Arzt / die Ärztin | doctor (m / f) |
| der Patient / die Patientin | patient (m / f) |
| die Apotheke | pharmacy |
Symptoms and conditions
| German | English |
|---|---|
| der Schmerz (pl. die Schmerzen) | pain |
| das Fieber | fever |
| der Husten | cough |
| die Übelkeit | nausea |
| der Blutdruck | blood pressure |
| die Wunde | wound |
| die Atemnot | shortness of breath |
Actions and checks
| German | English |
|---|---|
| Blutdruck messen | to measure blood pressure |
| Fieber messen | to take a temperature |
| Medikamente verabreichen | to administer medication |
| eine Spritze geben | to give an injection |
| den Verband wechseln | to change the dressing |
| die Anamnese | the patient history / intake |
| die Übergabe | the handover |
A single alphabetical list of 200 words is how most people fail at this. Your brain files vocabulary by context, so learning "die Übergabe" next to the other handover words, at the moment you would actually use them, is what makes it come back on shift.
That grouping isn't just tidier. There's a reason a focused core works harder than a long list.
Paul Nation, who has spent a career measuring how many words you actually need, found that a surprisingly small core of the most frequent word families covers the large majority of everyday language. You do not need all of German to work a shift. You need the few hundred words that keep recurring, learned well enough that they surface without effort. That is why a deliberate core beats a giant glossary you half-remember: frequency does the heavy lifting, so put your effort where the recurrence is.
Paul Nation, on lexical coverage.
The way to make it surface without effort is to retrieve it, not re-read it. Here is a set to try.
Drill the core
Match each phrasal verb with get to its meaning.
0 of 8 matched. Tap a term, then its match.
Keep going
This is the vocabulary layer. The next layer is stringing it into the phrases you actually say to a patient and to a colleague at handover, which is its own post: German for the ward: the phrases you use every shift. If you are earlier than this and starting German from zero, begin with what A1 actually covers for a nurse.
Sources & further reading
- Council of Europe: the CEFR. The framework behind the A1 to B2 levels German employers ask nurses for.
- Goethe-Institut: German for nursing care. Official, free self-study material for care German.
- Word lists by frequency. The frequency principle behind learning a focused core first.
Written by
Builder at Lingoken
By day I build, and I love teaching kids to code. On weekends I dance, contemporary and Kathak. Languages are the thing I keep coming back to: I grew up between a few (Sindhi, Hindi, Marathi, English) and I'm still happily stumbling through Spanish, Telugu, and Malayalam. That slow, enjoyable business of actually learning a language convinced me practice has to be something you want to do, which is what we're building at Lingoken. I write here about making language activities people genuinely enjoy.
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