Behind the Hunt
German Article Hunt Just Got Harder. Or Easier. You Choose.
Learning der, die and das is hard enough. But not everyone needs to practise with the same German vocabulary.
A beginner probably does not need to know the article for an obscure technical term. An advanced learner, on the other hand, may not find Haus, Mann and Zeit particularly terrifying.
So German Article Hunt now has four difficulty levels.
And the hardest one is not just about obscure words. Killer has been designed to take away some of the clues German normally gives you.
Beginner — Everyday German
About 600 nouns
This is the place to start.
Beginner focuses on common, useful German nouns that you are likely to encounter early and often. The vocabulary has been deliberately curated rather than simply selected by frequency.
The idea is simple: practise the articles while working with words that are genuinely useful for a learner of German.
Intermediate — Broader vocabulary
About 3,100 nouns
Once everyday German starts feeling comfortable, Intermediate opens up a much larger vocabulary.
You will still encounter plenty of familiar words, but also nouns that appear less frequently and require a broader command of German.
This is probably where many learners will spend a lot of time.
Advanced — Serious challenge
About 13,000 nouns
Advanced is where things become interesting.
The vocabulary includes less common, more specialised and more demanding German nouns. These are all legitimate words — but you should no longer expect German to play nicely.
If you consistently score well here, your instinct for German grammatical gender is becoming seriously good.
Killer — No mercy
More than 22,000 nouns
And then there is Killer.
Killer is not simply a bigger vocabulary list. It has been deliberately designed to make guessing the article as difficult as possible.
German nouns often contain clues to their grammatical gender. Endings such as -ung, -heit, -keit, -schaft, -ität and -ion, for example, can make DIE relatively easy to predict. Other endings provide strong clues for DER or DAS.
In Killer, many of those giveaways have been deliberately removed.
We also filter out many transparent compound nouns where a familiar final component would reveal the gender. If you already know that die Tür is feminine, for example, a complicated-looking compound ending in -tür is not necessarily much of a challenge.
What remains is a pool of more than 22,000 nouns chosen to give you as few easy clues as possible. Rare words, specialist vocabulary, loanwords, unusual compounds and lexical oddities can all appear.
Killer is not primarily designed for sensible language learning. It is designed for people who look at Advanced and think:
Is that all you've got?
Native German speakers are very welcome to discover how good they really are.
Classic Hunt now lets you choose
When you start a Classic Hunt, you first choose the article you want to practise — DER, DIE or DAS — and then choose your difficulty.
Each level has its own vocabulary pool, so moving from Beginner to Intermediate or Advanced is a genuine increase in difficulty rather than simply a different label on the same game.
And if you regret choosing Killer, German Article Hunt accepts no responsibility.
Daily Hunt has levels too
The same four levels are now available in Daily Hunt.
Everyone still gets the same article on a given day, but you can choose how difficult you want your Daily Hunt to be.
Each level has its own set of 20 questions, so Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced and Killer players can all take part in the same daily challenge at an appropriate level.
Your result is recorded together with the level you played, which also means Daily Hunt statistics can distinguish between performances at different difficulty levels.
Better on mobile, too
We have also redesigned the level selector for smaller screens.
On desktop, each difficulty has its own full card with a description of what to expect. On mobile, the selector becomes much more compact:
- Beginner · 600 words
- Intermediate · 3,100 words
- Advanced · 13,000 words
- Killer · 22,000+ words
All four choices are visible at once, with colour, icons and difficulty cues making it easy to jump straight into another game.
Because nobody should have to scroll just to find No mercy.
Which level should you choose?
There is no complicated placement test.
Start where you think you belong.
If it feels too easy, move up. If Advanced starts throwing nouns at you that appear to have escaped from a nineteenth-century engineering manual, move down.
Or don't.
German Article Hunt is a game. The important thing is that you keep noticing German nouns, guessing their gender and gradually developing the instinct that makes der, die and das a little less mysterious.
And if that gets too easy?
Killer is waiting.