How long it takes to get der, die and das right
Nobody can tell you how long German takes. This one part of it is a division problem, because the pile is finite and you choose the pace.
A B1-level syllabus comes to 1,534 nouns. Set a daily goal and the calendar falls out of it. That is the entire calculation, and the table below is it worked out at the four paces this app offers.
The default setting is 20 a day, roughly five minutes, and roughly 11 weeks of them.
At each pace
| A day | Days | Weeks |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | 154 | 22 |
| 20 | 77 | 11 |
| 30 | 52 | 8 |
| 50 | 31 | 5 |
Read that as a floor, not a finish line
The daily goal counts answers, and a review is an answer. Spaced repetition works by bringing a word back after a day, then a few days, then a week, then a month, so from the second day onward part of every session is words you have already met. Those reviews eat into the same daily number, which means the table above is the fastest the deck can possibly go and the real calendar sits behind it.
How far behind depends on you, and this is the point at which most pages of this kind invent a multiplier. There is not one here, because the honest answer is that it depends on how often you get a word wrong, and nobody knows that about you until you start.
What the reviews buy is the only thing worth having. A word you crammed and did not review is gone inside a week, so a schedule with no review load in it finishes on paper and nowhere else. The reviews are why the number sticks after the exam.
The one real shortcut is that a large share of these nouns never need memorising at all. Their ending decides the article, and one rule can retire dozens of words at once.