Table of Contents
Overview of the B2 Level
At the B2 level you move from being an independent everyday user of German to a confident communicator in more complex and abstract situations. You can understand main ideas in demanding texts, take part in detailed discussions, and express your opinions with nuance and justification. This chapter gives you a roadmap of what you will build in the B2 part of this course and how it expands on your B1 knowledge.
Communicative Goals at B2
At B2, you are expected to handle German in many areas of personal, academic, and professional life. You can already talk about past, present, and future events, and you have experience with more complex sentence structures from B1. Now the focus shifts to precision, register, and complex argumentation.
You will learn to participate in longer conversations, even when topics are unfamiliar, as long as they are within your general fields of interest. You will also become more flexible in switching between informal and formal communication, which is important in German-speaking workplaces and institutions.
Language in Daily Life and Work
One central part of B2 is learning to adapt your language to different situations. You will study:
- The difference between informal language used with friends and colleagues and formal language used with superiors, customers, or in official contexts.
- Functional phrases that help you manage conversations, especially in work situations. These include phrases for clarifying, summarizing, interrupting politely, and expressing agreement or disagreement in a more nuanced way.
This area prepares you to take part in meetings, make polite but clear requests, and react appropriately in emails and spoken communication.
Media and Society
At B2 you start to deal more intensively with texts from newspapers, magazines, and serious online media. You will learn:
- How to understand and talk about reported speech, using Subjunctive I, which is very typical in written news texts.
- How to recognize and form passive constructions, which are frequent in reports, instructions, and formal writing.
- How to grasp the structure and typical vocabulary of newspaper articles and other informational texts.
This helps you to read German news more confidently and to discuss social, political, and cultural topics with more depth.
Science and Technology
Another focus at B2 is the ability to understand and work with more specialized and technical texts. You do not have to become a scientist, but you should:
- Handle longer, information-dense texts that are related to science, technology, or other specific fields.
- Learn the process of nominalization, which allows German to build compact and formal expressions from verbs and adjectives.
This will improve both your reading skills and your own writing in more formal or academic contexts.
Discussion and Debate
At B2 your opinions and arguments in German become more structured and persuasive. In this part of the course you will:
- Practice presenting advantages and disadvantages of different options or positions.
- Learn to use Subjunctive II to express hypothetical situations, polite wishes, and unreal conditions, which is very important in nuanced discussions.
- Develop strategies to build clear and balanced arguments, respond to counterarguments, and support your claims.
This prepares you for seminars, group discussions, and advanced exam tasks.
Advanced Past Tenses
You already know and use the perfect tense and the basic simple past from earlier levels. At B2 you improve your control of narrative time. You will:
- Learn and use the past perfect to describe events that happened before other past events.
- Work with narrative styles that are typical for stories, reports, and biographies in German.
This allows you to tell more complex stories and to understand written narratives more easily.
Presentations and Speeches
At the B2 level you do not just participate in conversations. You also begin to structure information for others. In this part of the course you will:
- Learn how to plan and give short presentations in German with a clear introduction, main part, and conclusion.
- Use rhetorical devices to emphasize points, signal structure, and keep the listener’s attention.
These skills are very useful for work presentations, study contexts, and exam tasks that require spoken production.
Idioms and Colloquial Language
Finally, you will be introduced to idioms and more colloquial expressions that native speakers often use in informal situations. At B2 level this means:
- Understanding common idiomatic expressions so that you are not confused in everyday conversations.
- Learning when it is appropriate to use colloquial language and when it is better to stay neutral or formal.
This part helps you sound more natural and understand authentic spoken German from films, podcasts, and real-life conversations.
How the B2 Level Builds on Previous Levels
Everything you do at B2 builds on the grammatical structures, vocabulary, and skills from A1 to B1. You are not learning an entirely new system but refining what you already know. The new elements of B2 are:
At B2 you move from basic correctness to controlled, flexible, and appropriate use of German in different contexts, including work, study, and public life.
You will meet longer texts, more complex grammar forms, and a broader, more abstract vocabulary. You also start to think more consciously about style and register, which prepares you for the C1 level.
New Vocabulary for This Chapter
| German term | English meaning |
|---|---|
| das Sprachniveau B2 | B2 language level |
| die Alltagssprache | everyday language |
| die formelle Sprache | formal language |
| die informelle Sprache | informal language |
| die Medien | media |
| die Zeitung | newspaper |
| die Gesellschaft | society |
| die Fachsprache | technical language |
| die Nominalisierung | nominalization |
| die Diskussion | discussion |
| die Debatte | debate |
| der Vortrag | presentation, talk |
| die Rede | speech |
| der Bericht | report |
| der Zeitungsartikel | newspaper article |
| die Erzählung | narrative, story |
| die Höflichkeitsform | polite form |
| der Stil | style |
| die Umgangssprache | colloquial language |
| die Redewendung | idiom, fixed expression |