How many German nouns a B1 exam actually asks for
German has a few hundred thousand nouns and you are never learning them. A B1 vocabulary list is a finite pile, and a finite pile is a thing you can finish.
1,534 nouns, each one with an article you either know or do not
- A1 323 the words you were taught first and have been guessing at ever since
- A2 275 the everyday middle, where most of the compound nouns start
- B1 936 the band the exam is named after, and the largest of the three
The number people expect is the B1 row on its own. It is not, because a syllabus is cumulative: nothing tells you that the A1 words stop being examinable once you sit a harder paper, and in practice they are the ones that trip you, because you met them before anybody explained that the article was worth learning as part of the word.
So the honest figure for a B1 candidate is the whole set. It sounds worse and it is actually the good news: it is a closed set. Nothing gets added to it while you work through it, which is not true of any other part of learning a language.
What this is: a word list at B1 level, the kind a course or a coursebook is built around. What it is not: an official document with a stamp on it. The list carries a handful of words that look Austrian and Swiss rather than German, a fingerprint no official list would leave, so the truthful description is a B1-level syllabus and that is the one used everywhere on this site.
Not all of them have to be memorised
301 of the 1,534 carry an ending that decides the article outright. That is 20% of the pile gone to a handful of rules rather than to repetition. The rest is what spaced repetition is for.