How do you get from A2 to B1 German?

B1 is the level where you can manage on your own in German. You can follow the main points when people speak clearly about everyday things, cope with most situations when travelling, and explain your opinions and plans in simple terms.¹ It is the third of six levels on the CEFR, the European scale that runs from A1 for beginners to C2.

Expect this step to feel harder than the last one. The jump from A2 feels huge to a lot of learners. The ones who got through it rarely relied on a course alone. What they did comes down to four things:

Speak every week, with a tutor, a tandem partner, a conversation group, or on your own.
Learn words on purpose. Too few words and weak speaking are the two gaps learners at this stage mention again and again.
Use German with real people: at work, with friends, at events.
Do practice exams in the format of the test you’ll take.

The rest of this page explains each one. For the whole route from A1, see the German learning roadmap.

What can you actually do at B1 German, and how do you know you’re there?

At B1 you can:²

Listen: follow the main points of clear, standard speech on familiar topics, and of radio or TV when it’s slow and clear.
Read: understand everyday texts, like letters, notices and short articles on subjects you care about.
Speak: join a simple conversation on familiar subjects, describe your experiences and give short reasons for your views.
Write: write a clear personal letter or a short connected text about events and feelings.

You don’t need to understand every word. Mistakes, and asking people to repeat themselves, are part of the level. For vocabulary, the Goethe-Institut’s B1 word list has about 2,400 words you should at least recognise. It’s free to download and works as a checklist.

Don’t treat a finished course or a certificate as proof on its own. Some learners only felt at B1 once they used German for real: after months working with people who spoke no English, or after a long evening among German speakers without switching to English.³ A situation like that is a better test than a course level.

How long does it take to reach B1 German, and is three months realistic?

Plan on roughly another 110 to 225 hours of lessons. The Goethe-Institut says reaching A2 takes 200 to 350 lessons of 45 minutes, and reaching B1 takes 350 to 650, depending on what you already know and how you learn.⁴ The difference is 150 to 300 lessons, which is where the 110 to 225 hours comes from.

How fast that goes depends on your hours and your head start. One learner who was already at A2.2, the second half of A2, kept a log: about 98 hours over nine weeks of flashcards, grammar exercises, practice exams, A2 classes and a weekly tutor, ending in a pass in the Goethe B1 exam. They said years of Luxembourgish, a close relative of German, and not working at the time made a big difference.

Most learners take longer. Those who started from almost nothing and studied hours a day, or took classes five days a week, reported six months to a year.⁵ Learning alongside a job, with a weekly tutor, can take two years or so.⁶

Three months from zero is a common hope. Don’t count on it. The people who report doing it in three months had a head start, such as earlier German classes or most of the Duolingo course, and studied for hours a day.⁷

Why is the jump from A2 to B1 so big, and how do you get across it?

At A2 you talk about yourself in short, simple phrases: your family, your job, what you need day to day. At B1 you have to connect them. You tell a story, describe what happened and how you felt, and give reasons for your opinions and plans. The topics widen too, from basic needs to work, interests, travel and the news.⁸ For what A2 covers, see the A2 guide.

Fix your basics. Some of the grammar that trips learners up at B1 is grammar from earlier levels: the cases, which show who does what to whom, and adjective endings, which change with the case.

Work on vocabulary. Words come up again and again when learners explain why B1 felt hard: falling behind a class, struggling with a local magazine, or simply feeling overwhelmed by how many there are. Learners pick up new words by:

listening to podcasts such as Easy German and looking words up as they go;
reading things they want to read: German news, children’s novels, or a book in their own field. Graded readers, written for learners, are an easier start;
asking German speakers to explain a word in German, then using it.

Flashcards split opinion. Some learners credit spaced-repetition apps like Anki, which show hard words more often, with a bigger vocabulary. Others say flashcards never stuck.⁹ Try them, and drop them if they don’t work for you.

Use German outside your lessons. Several learners who got across also used German for real: at a part-time job, an internship, a festival, or with German friends. If finding the time is the problem, the study plan for busy learners covers how to fit it into a week.

How can I get my German speaking to B1, not just pass the exam?

Speak more than feels comfortable, starting now. Many learners at this stage say their speaking lags behind. They can write and follow a class, but find it hard to answer out loud. It can fail you on its own: one learner passed every other part of the Goethe B1 exam and scored 49 out of 100 in speaking.¹⁰

The target is modest. At B1 you can start, keep going and end a simple conversation on a familiar topic. You pause to plan or fix what you say, but people can follow you.¹¹

Any of these can help, as long as you do it often:

A regular conversation partner. Learners who improved talked every week with a relative, a tutor, German friends, or partners from a tandem app such as Tandem, where you swap languages with a native speaker. Learner communities with live speaking sessions, and local German meetups, do the same job.
Talking to yourself, every day. An electrician working in Germany, who knew the grammar but panicked when speaking at work, recorded 101 daily videos. Each time they read an article, then talked about it unscripted for 15 to 30 minutes. They went from struggling to fill five minutes to talking for half an hour with less fear. Describing your day aloud is a smaller version of the same thing.
AI voice chat, if there’s nobody to talk to. One learner used ChatGPT’s voice mode for follow-up questions and corrections, and found it useful, but said a real partner is better.

Is Nicos Weg, or any one course, enough to reach B1?

Use a course as your backbone, but plan to add to it. Nicos Weg is Deutsche Welle’s free video course, and its courses run up to B1.¹² Learners who reached B1 with it added a lot more: flashcards, podcasts, exam books, mock exams and regular speaking practice.¹³ There’s more in our Nicos Weg review.

Don’t expect an app to carry you through B1. Two Babbel users found its B1 section short, and a Duolingo user of more than three years rated their own reading at about A1 once they tried material outside the app.¹⁴ See our Babbel and Duolingo reviews.

Is it normal to feel stuck at B1, and what do you do about it?

Yes. Plenty of learners post about it, and the causes they name are the gaps above: too few words, too little speaking, and too little real use. That can mean living in Germany but working in English, a routine of mostly reading and listening, or not enough contact with people.

If that sounds like you, change what you do rather than doing more of it. Add speaking, and find somewhere you have to use German. For general method, see learning efficiently. For what comes next, see the B2 guide.

How hard is the B1 German exam, and how do I prepare?

There are three common B1 exams: the Goethe-Zertifikat B1, telc Deutsch B1 from the exam provider telc, and the ÖSD Zertifikat B1 from ÖSD, the Austrian German exam. All three test reading, listening, writing and speaking. The writing tasks are short emails or letters, personal and formal, and in the Goethe and ÖSD exams a short opinion as well. In the Goethe and telc exams, speaking is normally done in pairs: you plan something together with another candidate, and in the Goethe exam you also give a short presentation.¹⁵

	Goethe-Zertifikat B1	ÖSD Zertifikat B1	telc Deutsch B1
Parts	Four modules, which you can take separately	Four modules, which you can take separately	A written exam and a spoken exam
To pass	60 out of 100 in each module	60 out of 100 in each module	60% in the written part and 60% in the spoken part
Example fee	€259, or €104 per module, at Goethe-Institut centres in Germany	Ask your exam centre	€200 or €230 at two Berlin centres
Free practice test	Yes, on the Goethe-Institut site¹⁶	Yes, on the ÖSD site¹⁶	Yes, on the telc site¹⁶

Figures checked on 3 November 2026.¹⁷ Fees differ between centres, so check yours.

Learners most often name two parts as the hardest. One is speaking under pressure, sometimes with a partner who repeats points or runs out of ideas. The other is listening, where some texts are played only once and the answer options are easy to mix up. It isn’t the same for everyone: one learner found speaking the easiest part, because the topics can be prepared.¹⁸

Prepare in the exam’s own format:

Do practice tests, lots of them. Learners who passed worked through the official sample papers, exam-prep books and mock exams, some almost daily in the last weeks.
Write letters every week and get them corrected. Write a few practice letters a week and have a teacher, a native speaker or ChatGPT correct them, and collect phrases you can reuse in any letter. One engineer over 50 copied one or two model letters a day for two months before the telc exam.¹⁹
Rehearse the speaking topics out loud. They’re predictable enough to prepare.²⁰

Sources

Council of Europe, CEFR global scale. ↩
Council of Europe, CEFR self-assessment grid. ↩
How long did it take you to reach B1?, r/German; When did you realise you were B1?, r/languagelearning. ↩
Goethe-Institut, Goethe-Zertifikat A2 and Goethe-Zertifikat B1. ↩
From almost nothing to B1 in 6 months and How I went from A0 to B1, r/German. ↩
My path to the B1 Goethe-Zertifikat, Medium. ↩
How to reach B1 in 3 months and Passed the B1 exam in 3 months, r/German. ↩
Council of Europe, CEFR companion volume, self-assessment grid. ↩
I am stuck at B1, r/German; Stuck between A2 and B1, r/languagelearning. ↩
B1 yet struggling to form basic sentences and Passed every B1 module except speaking, r/German. ↩
Council of Europe, CEFR qualitative aspects of spoken language. ↩
Deutsche Welle, Nicos Weg. ↩
How I went from A0 to B1 using Nicos Weg and From almost nothing to B1 in 6 months with Nicos Weg, r/German. ↩
Underwhelmed by Babbel’s B1 course and a Duolingo user on reaching beyond the app, r/German. ↩
Goethe-Institut, Goethe-Zertifikat B1; ÖSD, ÖSD Zertifikat B1; telc, telc Deutsch B1. ↩
Goethe-Institut, B1 practice materials; ÖSD, ÖSD Zertifikat B1; telc, telc Deutsch B1. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Goethe-Institut, B1 results and exam fees in Germany; ÖSD, B1 exam rules; telc, telc Deutsch B1 mock test, 2019 edition, for the pass marks; WIPA Berlin and GLS Berlin fee pages. ↩
How to pass the B1 German exam, Transported by Liebe. ↩
telc B1 passed thanks to Deutsche Bahn, r/German. ↩
How to pass the B1 German exam, Transported by Liebe; B1 exam tips after passing, r/German. ↩