German hangs the case on the article, so it leaves your mouth while the noun that fixes the gender is still coming.

Five places where the German has to be assembled in an order the thought does not follow.

• The verb waits at the end

  Say weil, dass or wenn and the finite verb goes to the end of the clause, which means the sentence is planned or it is not. In writing you can go back and rearrange. Speaking, you commit at the first word.

• Cases decided before the noun arrives

  Der, dem, den, des — the article carries the case, and it arrives before the noun that would have reminded you of the gender. Add adjective endings that shift with the article, and dative verbs like helfen and gefallen, and the decision has to be instant.

• Separable prefixes you have to remember

  Anrufen becomes ich rufe dich morgen an, and the an sits in your working memory through everything in between. Forget it and you have said something else, or nothing. Aufgeben, angeben and ausgeben all start out as ich gebe, and only the prefix at the end tells them apart.

• Spoken German is not written German

  The past tense you learned from books is not the past tense people speak. Outside sein, haben and the modals, conversation runs on the Perfekt, and in Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland the Präteritum has largely gone from speech altogether. Then there are doch, mal, eben and halt, which no reading drills.

• The sounds reading lets you skip

  Reading lets you skip the ich-Laut and the ach-Laut, the rounded ü and ö, and the vowel length that separates Stadt from Staat and offen from Ofen. Final devoicing turns Tag into something closer to Tak. None of it matters until someone has to understand you.

The oral is where the German has to be built in real time, and every board below runs one.

Five boards, five ways of asking you to talk: a second candidate, a microphone, a diagram, a stranger you have to agree a date with. FluentPass is not affiliated with any of them and cannot mark to their scales, but the tasks below are what the sessions are built from.

• Goethe-Zertifikat B2 (Goethe-Institut)

  Fifteen minutes with a second candidate and fifteen to prepare. You give a short structured talk on one of two topics and answer questions on it, then argue a position with your partner and react to theirs.

• Digital TestDaF (g.a.s.t. / TestDaF-Institut)

  Seven speaking tasks into a microphone, no examiner across the table and no partner to react to you. You state a position in a seminar, advise a fellow student, read figures off a diagram — each on its own clock.

• DSH (Deutsche Sprachprüfung für den Hochschulzugang)

  Run by the individual German university, not a central board. You get a text or a set of figures, twenty minutes alone with it and usually a monolingual dictionary, then present it and defend what you said in discussion.

• telc Deutsch B2

  A pair exam of roughly fifteen minutes in three parts: a short presentation with questions, a discussion where you have to hold a line, and a planning task you must finish by agreeing on something with the other candidate.

• ÖSD Zertifikat B2

  The Austrian certificate, sat as a pair or alone, with fifteen minutes to prepare. Three parts: an information exchange, a picture you have to talk about, and a discussion. Austrian and Swiss standard usage is accepted throughout.

What are you practising for?

• Exams in German
• Work & study in German
• Travel in German

Nothing here is a Zertifikat

The Goethe-Institut, telc, ÖSD and the TestDaF-Institut award certificates. We do not, and we have no connection to any of them. The number a session produces was worked out by us for you, and it predicts nothing about a real Prüfung. Nor is this a beginner course: it starts where you have the German and cannot get it out in order, with the right endings, at speed.