How do you get from A1 to A2 German?

A2 is the second of six levels on the CEFR, the European scale that runs from A1 for beginners to C2. At A2 you can handle routine everyday tasks in German: shopping, simple exchanges about your work and family, a short account of your weekend, a short message.¹ It is still basic German. You’ll pause, make mistakes and need people to slow down.

Getting there from A1 comes down to a few things:

Use one structured course as your backbone. Deutsche Welle’s free Nicos Weg course has taken learners all the way to a pass in the A2 exam.²
Learn the A2 grammar and words: mainly the Perfekt (the spoken past tense), the dative case, more modal verb forms and sentences joined with weil and dass, plus a vocabulary of about 1,300 words.
Speak and write every week, and get corrections. A course gives you the grammar and words, but speaking and writing need practice of their own.
Test yourself with a free model exam before you book the real one.

From A1, expect about three to four more months at an hour or so a day.³ If you’re not at A1 yet, start with the A1 guide. For the whole path, see the German learning roadmap.

What does A2 German actually mean, and is it fluent?

At A2 you can do short, practical things in each skill:⁴

Listen: catch the main point of short, clear announcements, and follow speech about everyday things when it’s slow.
Read: short simple texts, adverts, menus, timetables and personal emails.
Speak: ask and answer simple questions, describe your family, home and work in a series of short sentences, and say what you did last weekend.
Write: short notes and messages, and a simple email about everyday life.

No, A2 is not fluent. The Council of Europe describes A2 speech as short and full of pauses and restarts, with basic grammar mistakes that keep coming back. You can answer questions and react, but you rarely understand enough to keep a conversation going on your own.⁵ Conversation with native speakers without strain is how it describes B2, two levels up.

One learner described their A2 well. After five months of courses, living with German flatmates in Bavaria, they could manage three or four rehearsed lines in a shop, bar or train, read signs and adverts, and understand their flatmates when they spoke slowly to them. They couldn’t follow the flatmates talking to each other, or keep up at a language café.⁶

Finishing an A2 course isn’t the same as being at A2. Learners who finished A2 classes or an app’s A2 course describe reading reasonably but struggling to build sentences out loud or understand people at normal speed.⁷

How long does it take to get from A1 to A2 German, and why does it feel so big?

From A1, plan on about three to four months at an hour or so a day, and longer if you study less. One learner who studied about an hour a day reached A1 after two months and A2 after about six, around 180 to 200 hours in all, so roughly four months for the step. Learners who took an A2 course after A1 report three or four months for it.³

That learner’s 180 to 200 hours sits inside the official range: the Goethe-Institut, Germany’s official language institute, counts about 150 to 260 hours of lessons from zero to A2.⁸

The jump from A1 feels big for concrete reasons. Course books get denser and the writing tasks longer. You have to remember a noun’s gender, pick the right case ending and put the verb in the right place, all at once. And material outside your own course, even when it’s labelled A2, can feel much harder than the course’s own exercises.⁹

To get through it, keep going back over earlier topics while you learn new ones: the new material makes old points clearer. If your class teaches only in German, look up the same grammar explained in English as well, for example in YouTube videos.¹⁰

What grammar and vocabulary do you need for A2 German?

Most A2 grammar builds on things you met at A1, like the first Perfekt forms, modal verbs and the dative after some prepositions.¹¹ At A2 you use them more widely and add a few new pieces. The main ones:¹²

The Perfekt, the past tense Germans use when speaking. It’s a helper verb, usually haben, plus a past form of the main verb at the end: Ich habe Reis gekocht (I cooked rice). Verbs of movement or change, like gehen (to go), take sein instead: Ich bin nach Hause gegangen (I went home).
The dative case, the form for the person something is given or done for: Ich gebe meinem Bruder den Schlüssel (I give my brother the key). It also follows prepositions like mit (with) and bei (at).
More modal verb forms, including the past and polite forms: Ich musste früh gehen (I had to leave early), Könntest du warten? (Could you wait?).
Separable verbs, which split in a normal sentence: Ich stehe um sieben auf (I get up at seven), from aufstehen.
Sentences joined with weil, dass and wenn (because, that, when), which send the verb to the end: Ich bleibe hier, weil es regnet (I’m staying here because it’s raining).

You don’t need every ending right. The Goethe-Institut says being understood counts for more than perfect forms at this level, and its A2 grammar list is mainly about what you should understand.

For vocabulary, the Goethe-Institut’s A2 word list has about 1,300 words, counted from zero, that you should at least recognise. Goethe says it shows what the exam covers and isn’t a good tool to learn from on its own.¹³

Flashcards work for some people and not others. One learner passed the Goethe A2 exam with 88 out of 100 using Anki, a free flashcard app, for the words on that list. Another did six weeks of Anki at 25 new words a day and found most of them didn’t stick.¹⁴ If flashcards aren’t working for you, learn the words you actually met that week, in short phrases, or read easy books without looking up every word.¹⁵

Can you reach A2 German with free resources like Nicos Weg and YouTube?

Yes, if you add speaking and writing practice. One learner went from almost nothing to 92 out of 100 in the Goethe A2 exam in about three months, using the free Nicos Weg A1 and A2 courses with their own notes, online grammar exercises and practice exams. They had six months of school German years earlier and studied four to five hours a day. They said the course covered grammar, words and understanding, but speaking and writing needed separate practice. Another learner passed with Nicos Weg and exam books but still couldn’t reply quickly in conversation when they got to Vienna.¹⁶

Four free resources and who each suits:

Resource	What it is	Good for
Nicos Weg	Deutsche Welle’s video course with exercises, A1 to B1¹⁷	your main course, if you’re learning alone
Easy German	street interviews with subtitles on YouTube, including an A2 playlist and slower Super Easy German; paid membership adds transcripts	extra listening
Nachrichtenleicht	daily news in simple German, with audio and explanations of hard words	reading short real texts
LangCorrect	write a short text and native speakers correct it; basic use is free	getting your writing corrected

For easy books, see our graded readers page, and for everything else, the recommended resources page.

How do you practise listening, speaking and writing at A2?

Listening. Use audio made for learners, like Natürlich German or Easy German, and listen to the same episode more than once, slowed down if you need to. Ordinary TV and films are usually too fast without help, so if you watch them, use German subtitles, slow them down or watch the same thing more than once.¹⁸

Speaking, on your own. Imagine a situation, like returning something to a shop, act out the conversation aloud, note where you run out of words, look them up and do it again. Or write a short diary entry, retell it aloud from memory and record yourself.¹⁹

Speaking, with a teacher. If you pay for lessons, pick a tutor who makes you talk for most of the lesson and corrects you, then has you practise the points you got wrong.²⁰

Writing. Start now, and get it corrected: short messages, diary entries, a few lines about a film. If you worry that writing early builds bad habits, the answer from learners who wrote at A1 and A2 is to check the corrections, study your mistakes and not translate word for word from English. Post short texts on LangCorrect or r/German, but check what people tell you: one A2 learner looked up a correction another learner gave them and found it was wrong.²¹

How do you know you’ve reached A2, and is the A2 exam worth taking?

Do a free model exam under real conditions: print it, keep to the time limits, play the audio once through, and find someone to do the speaking part with. There are three A2 exams: the Goethe-Zertifikat A2, telc Deutsch A2 and the Austrian ÖSD Zertifikat A2. All three publish free model tests, and the Goethe-Institut’s A2 practice materials include audio, answers and a speaking example. Learners who sat the Goethe A2 exam said its model test matched the real one.²²

Check how the exam is marked, because you can pass the total and still fail:

Exam	Parts	To pass
Goethe-Zertifikat A2	reading, listening, writing and speaking, 25 points each	60 out of 100, with at least 45 from reading, listening and writing, and at least 15 from speaking
telc Deutsch A2 (Start Deutsch 2)	the same four skills, 15 points each	36 out of 60; telc also sets a minimum for the written and spoken parts but doesn’t publish it, so don’t count on a strong part making up for a weak one; if you fail, you retake the whole exam
ÖSD Zertifikat A2 (Austria)	a written module (reading, listening, writing) and a speaking module	35 of 70 in the written module, with at least 5 in reading, 6 in listening and 3 in writing, and 10 of 20 in speaking; the modules can be taken separately

One learner scored at least 16 out of 25 on every section of their mock tests, then got 62 in the real Goethe exam and failed, because their reading, listening and writing came to less than 45.²³

The exam is worth taking when someone asks for it, or as a check on your progress. For Germany, the law asks for a level, not a particular exam:²⁴

A1 for a spouse joining a partner, and as the minimum for the opportunity card, the job-search visa (or English at B2 instead).
A2 earns points towards the opportunity card.
B1 for vocational training, permanent residence and citizenship.

Ask the embassy, authority or university which certificates it accepts before you book, and take one of those. If any will do, the ÖSD lets you retake just the module you failed; telc makes you retake the whole exam. The Universities of Vienna and Augsburg, for example, accept all three. Vienna wants A2 when you apply for a degree taught in German, and C1 before you start.²⁵ Some learners took A2 simply because their new university required it.²⁶ Even without a requirement, it can be useful: one learner who passed said the exam showed them exactly what they still needed, mainly live speaking practice.²⁷

For the speaking part, prepare short answers on the usual topics and say them aloud. One learner who felt their speaking went well had written about 60 short answers on travel, hobbies, sport, work and shopping, and said them aloud every day for weeks. Another, with no one to practise with, rehearsed in front of a mirror.²⁸

When you’re there, the B1 guide covers the next step.

Sources

Council of Europe, CEFR global scale; European Language Portfolio checklists, pp. 10 to 16. ↩
From almost nothing to A2 in 3 months with Nicos Weg, r/German; I passed my A2 exam in a month, r/German. ↩
How long did it take to reach A2 and how much did you study?, r/German, and two other replies in the thread. ↩ ↩²
Council of Europe, CEFR self-assessment grid. ↩
Council of Europe, CEFR qualitative aspects of spoken language use. ↩
What is expected from someone that just finished A2, r/German. ↩
A year ago I was at A2, today I received my Goethe C1, r/German; Just completed A2.1 and moving to A2.2, r/German. ↩
Goethe-Institut, Goethe-Zertifikat A2: further information, in German; Goethe-Institut London, How long does it take to learn German?, in German. ↩
The jump from A1 to A2 is nuts, r/German; Stuck at A2. Advice?, r/German. ↩
The jump from A1 to A2 is nuts, r/German; How long did it take to reach A2?, r/German; Mariia’s story, City of Flensburg, in German. ↩
Goethe-Institut, A1 Start Deutsch 1: exam goals and test description, pp. 102 to 105, in German. ↩
Goethe-Institut, A2 Fit in Deutsch 2: exam goals and test description, pp. 104 to 109, in German. This is the handbook for the teenagers’ A2 exam; the adult handbook is sold in bookshops. ↩
Goethe-Institut, Goethe-Zertifikat A2 word list, p. 4. ↩
Cleared my A2 level in first attempt, r/German; Starting A2.2, my main struggle is vocab, r/German. ↩
Replies in Starting A2.2, my main struggle is vocab, r/German; Which method is effective for learning vocabulary?, r/German. ↩
From almost nothing to A2 in 3 months with Nicos Weg, r/German; suzuka, personal account of the Goethe A2 and Vienna, note.com, in Japanese. ↩
Deutsche Welle, Nicos Weg teacher workbook, p. 4. ↩
suzuka, personal account of the Goethe A2 and Vienna, note.com, in Japanese; Give Natürlich German videos a try, r/German; Need tips to radically develop my listening, r/German; Lucy, How I’m learning German as a new arrival in Germany, The Talking Ticket. ↩
I’m A2 and I can’t speak in German, r/German; How do I start speaking at A2?, r/German. ↩
I’m A2 and I can’t speak in German, r/German; Learning A1/A2 German on your own, r/German. ↩
Ich lerne Deutsch und möchte dir helfen, r/German; Learning A1/A2 German on your own, r/German; Can someone correct this text? A2 student, r/German. ↩
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Gave my first ever Goethe exam (A2), r/German; Goethe-Institut, A2 adult model paper, p. 2. ↩
Federal Ministry of Justice, Residence Act sections 2, 9, 16a, 20a, 20b and 30, and Nationality Act section 10, in German. ↩
University of Vienna, German language proficiency; University of Augsburg, Evidence of German language skills A2. ↩
Passed A2 Goethe in a month, r/German. ↩
I passed the A2 exam, but it’s shown me what I’m missing, r/German. ↩
Just sat for my A2 exam and it went so badly, r/German; A2 exam prep, r/German. ↩