Sentences by ear

Reading German and hearing German are different skills, and the second one lags behind badly if you never practise it. The grammar here is nothing new — it is everything A2 has taught, arriving at speaking speed.

Listen once through before writing anything. Replay as often as you like — that is not cheating, it is the exercise.

There is a Slower button next to every item. Use it after you have tried at normal speed, not before: the goal is to end up understanding German at the pace Germans actually speak it.

Three things are genuinely hard to hear at A2, and they are worth listening for:

• hätte · hatte

  would have · had

  the umlaut is the whole difference between a wish and a fact

• wird repariert · wird reparieren

  is being repaired · will repair

  passive or future — decided by the last word

• …, der … · …, den … · …, dem …

  the relative pronoun

  one syllable that tells you who is doing what to whom

For dictation, punctuation and capitals matter less than the words — but German capitalises every noun, and writing them that way helps you notice which words are nouns.