Say weil in a stand-up and you have committed to a verb you have not chosen yet.

Six conversations where the German has to arrive finished the first time.

• The German job interview

  It opens with Erzählen Sie etwas über sich and you are expected to fill two or three minutes without a script. Then the awkward part in German: naming a Gehaltsvorstellung out loud and not flinching at the pause after it.

• Disagreeing in a meeting

  German workplace disagreement is more direct than most people expect and is usually not meant personally. The language for it — ich sehe das anders, da bin ich anderer Meinung — has to be assembled while the point is still on the table, not after it has passed.

• The Disputation, and the corridor before it

  Plenty of German postgraduate programmes teach in English while the lab, the corridor and the Kaffeeküche run in German. Then comes the Disputation: you defend the work in front of examiners who interrupt mid-clause and expect the sentence to survive being interrupted.

• The Amt appointment

  Anmeldung, Ausländerbehörde, Krankenkasse, Finanzamt. The clerk speaks fast, uses the official noun rather than the everyday one, and asks a question you did not prepare for. There is rarely an English option, and the next free Termin can be weeks away.

• The Fachsprachenprüfung

  Medicine is where German is least negotiable: you take a history from a patient in ordinary words, then hand the same patient over to a colleague in clinical ones, inside the same hour. Both halves are spoken, and the register has to switch cleanly between them.

• The Hausverwaltung on the telephone

  On the phone the German arrives without a face attached, at whatever speed the other person normally talks, and a Rückruf costs you another day. It is the exchange people postpone longest and the one that improves fastest once you rehearse it.

At work the endings and the word order are most of the impression you leave.

The AI partner corrects you mid-sentence and can switch to your own language when you are stuck. Afterwards you get a list of the structures that failed and how often each one did.

• Sie held right through, including the imperative and the Konjunktiv II that turns an instruction into a request.
• The long compound noun where a verb would have been quicker, and the written clause that collapses once you say it aloud.
• man and the passive, which colleagues reach for where English names a person, and which have to be decided at the start of the clause.
• drei Komma fünf for a decimal, der dritte Zehnte for a date, and a Termin read back to confirm it.
• A position stated plainly: a German meeting hears a weil clause that trails off as evasion rather than politeness.
• Titles and address: Herr and Frau with the surname, and the Doktortitel where a colleague still uses it.

Not the job itself

No employer, university or Behörde will take this as evidence of anything: it is not a qualification, and the Approbation, the Anerkennung and the visa are decided elsewhere on other paperwork. The vocabulary of your own field is yours to bring. What happens here is the ordering of it, out loud, at the speed a colleague talks.