Learn German for Travel, Work and Study

German uses the Latin alphabet with three umlauted vowels — ä, ö, ü — and the letter ß, a sharp s. Spelling is faithful to sound: “w” is v, “v” is f, “z” is ts, “ei” is the vowel of “eye” and “ie” the vowel of “see”, “ch” is the rasp of Scottish “loch” after a, o and u and a softer hiss after e and i, and “sch” is sh. Most words are stressed on the first syllable. Nouns begin with a capital letter, verbs and adjectives do not, so the skeleton of a sentence is visible at a glance, and long compounds — “Krankenversicherungskarte”, health insurance card — are read by finding the last noun and working backwards.

The grammar's reputation rests on the cases and the word order. Every noun is masculine, feminine or neuter, and the article changes with the noun's role in the sentence — “der Mann” sees “den Mann” and gives something to “dem Mann” — so that a learner spends the first year attaching the right article to the right case by reflex. In a main clause the verb takes second place no matter what opens the sentence; in a dependent clause it waits until the very end, which is why Germans seem to finish their sentences all at once: “…dass ich dich morgen anrufen werde”. Verbs conjugate by person, the past tense of speech is formed with “haben” or “sein”, and there are irregular verbs, as in English, for the most common actions.

German keeps a polite “Sie” and an informal “du”, and the line between them still means something. “Sie” with “Herr” or “Frau” and the surname is the default with strangers, officials, customers and colleagues one does not know well; “du” is for family, friends, children, students among themselves and, increasingly, the office — but the offer to switch, “Wollen wir uns duzen?”, comes from the senior or older person. Austria adds academic and professional titles to the address — “Herr Doktor”, “Frau Magister” — with a seriousness Germans tease it for.

Standard German, Hochdeutsch, is one written language for all three countries with small national differences — Austria says “Jänner” for January and “Paradeiser” for a tomato, Switzerland writes “ss” for ß — and the spoken reality is wider. Germany's dialects shade from the near-standard north to the Bavarian south; Austrians speak a southern German with its own music; and the Swiss speak Swiss German, a family of dialects far enough from the standard that Germans struggle with it, while writing and reading the standard and switching to it for foreigners. A learner learns Hochdeutsch, is understood everywhere, and acquires the local sound later.

For an English speaker German is a medium-length language — the US Foreign Service Institute puts it at around 900 classroom hours to professional working proficiency, longer than Spanish or Dutch and well short of Russian — and the hours are spent on the cases and the word order rather than on sound or vocabulary, half of which is recognisable. The first weeks are generous: greetings, numbers, a meal and a train come fast, because the spelling is regular and the words familiar. The first year is the hard one, while the genders and cases settle. After that German becomes a language of few surprises, and learners who reach B2 report that reading a newspaper or following a meeting feels easier than in French or Spanish at the same level.

In Berlin, Munich, Vienna and Zurich a visitor manages in English at hotels, museums, restaurants and railway stations, and anyone under forty will switch to it without being asked. German becomes necessary at the counters of the state — the foreigners' office, the registration office, the tax office, the health insurer — whose letters arrive in German and whose staff may not use English; in smaller towns and in the east of Germany; and in nearly every job outside the start-ups, research institutes and multinational headquarters that work in English. A bachelor's degree is taught in German and a certificate at B2 or C1 is the ticket in; master's programmes are often in English, and the public universities of Germany charge no tuition in either language.

• Numbers back to front: Twenty-one is “einundzwanzig”, one-and-twenty, and so on up to ninety-nine: Germans say the units before the tens, and foreigners write phone numbers down in the wrong order for years.
• Half three is half past two: “Halb drei” means half an hour before three, not after it. Meetings have been missed over this.
• A Handy is a phone and a Gift is poison: German invented “Handy” for a mobile phone from English parts English never used, and “Gift” means poison. “Also” means “so”, and “bekommen” means to receive, not to become.
• The capital letter tells you the noun: Every noun is capitalised, so “Der gefangene Floh” (the captured flea) and “der Gefangene floh” (the prisoner fled) are told apart by capitals alone.
• Words for what English only feels: “Schadenfreude”, pleasure at someone's misfortune; “Fremdschämen”, embarrassment on someone else's behalf; “Kummerspeck”, the weight put on by comfort eating — grief bacon.
• Mahlzeit: Said at midday in German offices, factories and canteens as both greeting and “enjoy your lunch”; the reply is “Mahlzeit”.
• Three countries, three hellos: “Moin” in the north of Germany at any hour, “Grüß Gott” and “Servus” in Bavaria and Austria, “Grüezi” in Switzerland. “Hallo” and “Guten Tag” work everywhere.

German is the best-certified language in Europe, and every certificate reports on the CEFR. The Goethe-Institut, Germany's cultural institute, offers the Goethe-Zertifikat at each level from A1 to C2, sat at its institutes in Germany and in nearly a hundred countries, and its A1 exam, Start Deutsch 1, is the one spouses sit before a family-reunion visa. telc, a German examining body, offers its own exams at every level, including versions for the workplace and for nursing, and shares the DTZ, the German test for immigrants at A2–B1 that ends the integration course and is the certificate most newcomers hold. Austria's ÖSD, the Austrian German Language Diploma, covers A1 to C2 with Austrian vocabulary and is accepted throughout the German-speaking world; the Austrian Integration Fund's exams cover the A2 and B1 modules of Austria's integration agreement. For university admission, the TestDaF reports levels 3 to 5 across four skills and the DSH is set by the universities themselves; a TestDaF 4 in all four parts or a DSH-2 opens any German-taught degree, and a Goethe C2 or telc C1 Hochschule does the same. In Switzerland the fide test measures spoken and written German separately for the residence steps.

What the three states ask is stated in levels. Germany: A1 for a spouse joining a partner, B1 for the settlement permit and for naturalisation, and B1 brings an EU Blue Card holder to settlement sooner than A1 does. Austria: A2 for the first module of the integration agreement and B1 for the second, B1 for citizenship after the ordinary wait and B2 for the early route, A1 for some spouses before arrival. Switzerland: A1 spoken for family reunification, A2 spoken and A1 written for a settlement permit, B1 spoken and A2 written for naturalisation, with cantons free to ask for more. Universities ask for B2 to C1; employers beyond the English-speaking islands of the economy want B2 and check. Six months of steady classes bring most adults to A2, a year to B1, and B2 arrives in the second year — the shape of the integration course, which is built to end at B1.

German has more free, high-quality learning material than any language but English, much of it from Germany's international broadcaster, which runs a complete video course from A1 to B1 and reads the news slowly every day. The self-learner needs a dictionary that gives gender and plural with every noun, a flashcard deck that stores the article as part of the word — “der Tisch”, never “Tisch” — and German television, which streams abroad with German subtitles on most programmes. The grammar, uniquely among the big languages, is worth studying from a book early, because it is finite and regular enough to repay the effort.

What a tutor adds in German is speed under the cases. A learner who knows that “mit” takes the dative still needs to say “mit dem Zug” without pausing, and only conversation with someone who supplies the article each time gets there; the same is true of the verb at the end of the clause, which has to be planned before the sentence begins. A tutor also settles the “Sie” and “du” question for the learner's actual office, and — for those bound for Austria or Switzerland — teaches the local words and sounds that the standard course books leave out.