All 460 questions of the official German citizenship test — with English explanations.
No build step, no server, no account, no tracking. Open it and it works, including offline.
[!NOTE]
Not a BAMF service and not officially endorsed. The questions are the official catalogue;
the English explanations are a study aid and are not part of it.
The full official catalogue: 460 questions — 300 general, plus 10 for each of the 16 federal
states. The exam you sit draws 33 of them.
Everything sits in one menu, the same on every page: Practise, Learn, and Settings,
which stays folded until you open it.
Practise
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| Practice | One question at a time with immediate feedback, tracking what you have already answered. Narrow it to questions you have never seen, or to ones you keep getting wrong. A right answer moves on by itself; a wrong one waits, because that pause is where the learning happens. |
| Browse | Read straight through the catalogue without being quizzed. |
| Exam | 33 questions under real conditions: 30 general and 3 from your state, nothing marked until you finish. 17 correct is a pass. Runs full screen as its own route, so the back button leaves the exam rather than the app, and past scores are kept. You can also draw from only what you have already answered, or from a range of catalogue numbers — handy while working through the catalogue in order. |
Learn
Three ways to understand the questions rather than memorise them.
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| Glossary | 361 German civic and legal terms, each with a plain-English explanation, searchable in German or English. |
| Who elects whom | A chart of who elects, appoints and scrutinises whom — Bund, Länder, Kommunen and the EU. Each body keeps the German name the questions use, with its English name beneath. Every box and arrow opens the catalogue questions behind it, and your state's own labels (term, voting age, what the head of government is called) are read from its ten questions. |
| How it happened | The history questions on one timeline: 27 events from 1933 to 2002, which between them answer 77 of the catalogue's questions. The line splits into West and East Germany in 1949, the Wall fills in between them from 1961 to 1989, and the two join again in 1990. Each event opens to the questions it answers, with their answers and the wrong option it is most easily confused with, and shows how many of them you already know. |
While you study
- English explanations. Civic and legal terms in the German questions are underlined; hover
or tap one for a plain-English gloss. 361 terms, matched in their inflected forms too — so
Ministerpräsidenten is recognised, not just Ministerpräsident.
- Hooks. A recognition aid for questions you have already worked through: one rare word in
the question, one word that appears in no other option. Scan for the first, pick the option
carrying the second. Turn on Show hooks to see the hook above every question, its answer
word held back until you answer; with it off, a hook appears only when you miss, so you have
it when that question comes back. It is for recall, not comprehension — do the understanding
first.
- Hear an answer. Once you have answered, press 1–4 to hear that answer read by the
browser's German voice. Answers that are only a number or a date are not read.
- Shuffle questions, shuffle answers. Shuffling answers is the one that matters — it stops
you memorising "the third option" instead of the actual answer, which is the classic way to
pass a practice app and fail the exam. The question shuffle leans toward what you get wrong:
questions you currently have wrong come up early in the order, and a question you miss
comes back after four other questions, again and again until you answer it right.
- Streak. In Practice, the top bar shows how many you have right in a row and your best
("Streak 4 · Best 12"). A wrong answer puts the streak back to 0, and every visit starts at 0.
Your best is kept with your progress.
- English subtitles after a wrong answer. The question and all four answers get an English
line underneath, written once for every question and kept close to the German wording. Point
at a German phrase, or tap it on a phone, and its English match lights up with it.
- Copy any question with one click, for looking something up elsewhere or pasting it into
your own notes.
- Pick your state to get the right 10 regional questions.
- Picture questions answer with a pointer. In 36 of the 39, the options read only "Bild 3"
or a bare "2" labelling a region on a map — nothing the picture does not already say. They are
drawn as one row of four buttons rather than four full-width rows, and the picture opens full
screen on a tap, which is how you read a small region on a map of Germany at 390px.
On your phone
Open the link and use Add to Home Screen. It then launches like an app and works with no
connection.
On a first visit it quietly caches all 38 question images in the background, so a randomly drawn
exam still has its pictures when you are underground. That is skipped if your browser reports a
metered or very slow connection.
Your progress is stored in your own browser (localStorage) and goes nowhere else.
Reset progress in Settings clears it.
Privacy
The app makes no network requests of its own: no analytics, no tracking, no telemetry, no
backend. It fetches only its own files from its own origin — the typeface included, so no
visitor IP reaches Google. The English subtitles ship with the app as one more file, so no
question is ever sent to a translation service.
Found a mistake?
Open an issue. Wrong
answers, confusing explanations and bad glossary entries are all worth reporting.
How it is built
Plain static files, served straight from the repository root. No build step, no dependencies,
no bundler: git push is the deploy.
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index.html | The shell — markup only |
tokens.css | The colours both pages share, light and dark |
app.css | All the app's styling, and the self-hosted @font-face |
app.js | The practice app, an ES module, ~1,300 lines |
data/questions.json | The 460-question catalogue |
data/glossary.json | 361 German→English terms, a study aid |
data/hooks.json | One memory hook per question — derived, fetched after the page loads and never waited for |
data/questions-en.json | English subtitles for every question and answer, with German↔English phrase pairs — written once for this app, fetched after the page loads |
organigramm.html .css .js | Who elects whom — the chart page, its own route; reads the same two data files |
timeline.html .css .js | How it happened — the history questions on one timeline, from data/timeline.json |
nav.js nav.css | The menu every page shares: Practise, Learn, and Settings folded away |
grade.js util.js | The grading rule and the small helpers the pages share |
img/ | The 38 question images, fetched only when a question needs one |
font/ | Archivo variable, latin subset, self-hosted |
sw.js | Service worker — offline support and caching |
source/ | The original inputs, for reference only |
The data is fetched at runtime rather than inlined, so a change to the styling does not make
returning visitors re-download the catalogue. First load is 95 KB over the wire.
One layout, placed two ways
There is a single set of controls in the markup; CSS decides where it lives. Below 62rem it is
a drawer behind the menu button, above it a permanent left rail that the same button collapses.
The chart and the timeline carry the same menu, always as a drawer, so they keep their full width.
The answers use position: sticky rather than being pinned: a short question has no gap above
them, and a tall picture question still keeps them on screen. Progress is a bottom sheet on a
phone — shut or open, no half-way — and the bar across the bottom on a wide screen. The 310-cell
grid is wide-screen only, where 9px cells read as one glanceable image; at a thumb-sized 26px it
would be two dozen rows of squares saying less than the numbers above it. Each cell sits on one
scale from red through an even grey to green, set by right answers minus wrong ones, so the grid
shows what you know well and not just what you have seen. A miss turns any question red; the next
right answer makes it even, and the one after gives back its green. Red cells are slashed and the
even cell carries a dash, so none of it rests on colour alone.
sw.js serves the shell network-first, so a deploy reaches people on their next reload with
no cache-busting needed; bump VERSION in it when the shell changes.
data/*.json is stale-while-revalidate, so a catalogue revision arrives on the visit after
next.
Everything in font/, img/ and icon/ is cache-first and assumed immutable — give a
file a new name if its bytes change.
The icons in icon/ are flat placeholders.
They are not the same thing, despite the names. The shipped data/glossary.json carries a rx
field per term — a match pattern with German word boundaries — and 89 of the 361 entries list
inflections that exist nowhere else:
Ministerpräsident → Ministerpräsidentinnen | Ministerpräsidenten | Ministerpräsidentin | Ministerpräsident
Those cannot be derived from the plain source file; they need German morphology. They also earn
their keep: of the 2,235 glossary matches across the catalogue, 542 are inflected forms.
Regenerating data/glossary.json from source/einbuergerungstest-glossar.json would delete all
of that silently — no error, no crash, just terms quietly ceasing to underline.
Source and licence
Questions and images come from the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (BAMF),
„Gesamtfragenkatalog zum Test ‚Leben in Deutschland' und zum ‚Einbürgerungstest'", dated
26 May 2025 — an official work under § 5 UrhG.
Licensing is split, because the exam content is not mine to license:
This is not a BAMF service and carries no official endorsement. The English explanations are
a study aid and are not part of the official catalogue. The catalogue is revised from time to
time — check the date above against the current official version before trusting it, and sit the
real thing on the official materials.
