Many of you who want — or need — to take an official German exam sooner or later, like the Goethe-Zertifikat, TELC, the Austrian ÖSD, or the Swiss FIDE exam, will come across the concept of the four language skills.
All of these exams are structured around four main sections:
- Listening
- Reading
- Writing
- Speaking
For many students, these exams are directly linked to courses.
The thinking often goes:
“If I need to pass a B1 exam, I need to take a B1 course.”
It feels logical.
But let’s take a step back and look more closely at how these four skills really work.
Four different skills… or one system?
At first glance, listening, reading, speaking, and writing seem like four separate abilities — four boxes to tick, four independent goals to master.
But are they really separate?
Think about water for a moment.
It can appear as ice, water, or steam.
Three completely different forms, right?
And yet, in their essence, they’re all the same: H₂O.
Change the conditions, and one form flows naturally into the next.
What changes is only the state — not the substance.
Here’s the fascinating part: these transformations often look sudden, but underneath, a process has been quietly building.
Take ice, for example.
You heat it slowly, degree by degree, and on the surface, nothing seems to happen.
But inside, the molecules are moving faster and faster — energy is accumulating.
And then, the moment it reaches 0°C, it crosses a threshold — and suddenly, you see the ice melting.
The same happens when water reaches 100°C and turns to steam.
It seems instant, but in reality, the change has been prepared long before you saw it.
From the outside, it looks like a jump.
Underneath, a process has been unfolding silently all along.
And though the appearance changes, the essence remains the same.
So let’s conclude with two important insights
1) Three different forms — but one essence.
Ice, water, and steam look distinct, but deep down, they’re the same thing.
2) What we see is simple — what happens underneath is complex.
On the surface, we just see three clear states.
But beneath them, there’s an invisible process happening that drives the transformation.
How this relates to language
Let’s see how the four language skills (listening, reading, writing, speaking) are also interconnected and share the same essence.
Think back to when you were a baby.
For months — even years — you just listened.
You weren’t practicing speaking. You were silently absorbing sounds, patterns, and meaning.
And then, one day, something changed.
You started speaking — first a word, then two, then entire sentences.
It wasn’t forced. It happened naturally.
Like ice melting when it warms up.
Or like a glass filling slowly until, at some point, the water simply overflows.
That’s how speaking begins: once your listening “reservoir” reaches a certain threshold, the words start coming.
Before you can read, you have to hear
After listening and speaking, you eventually learned to read.
And reading isn’t an isolated skill either — it builds on what you’ve already heard and said.
Let me share in this context a personal story:
When we lived in Spain, we wanted our two kids to grow up speaking German, so at home, we only spoke German.
One day, my sister gave one of my children a unique gift.
A German book, personalized with his name as the main character.
It was his very first German book, which made it even more special.
I said: “Let’s try.”
He opened the book and started reading.
At first, he guessed some pronunciations wrong — for example, he read “Buch” like in Spanish, where “ch” sounds different.
But immediately, he stopped, corrected himself, and said “Ah — Buch!”
Why?
Because he had heard the word and said the word many times before.
So his ears and mouth already knew what was correct.
Lost in pronunciation: The Spanish-English counterexample
This also explains why so many Spaniards struggle with English pronunciation.
In English, words often aren’t pronounced the way they’re written.
Many Spanish learners start at school with reading first, so they “learn” the visual shape of the word without knowing its sound.
Later, when they speak, the pronunciation comes out wrong — and the accent sticks.
“Speedy” for example becomes Espidi… (side effects of Espidifen, maybe?)
And finally… writing
The last skill to develop is writing — but again, it’s connected to reading.
When you read a lot, your eyes act like sensors.
Remember, your eyes are directly connected to your brain — in fact, scientists often describe them as an extension of the brain itself.
Vision is one of the most prioritized ways your brain processes information.
And because your brain is also connected to the rest of your body — including your hand when you write — it often feels as if your hand knows what to do.
If you’re an avid reader, you might have noticed this yourself:
when you write, sometimes you just feel that a certain spelling is correct.
It’s not that you consciously recall a rule — it’s that your eyes have captured the patterns so many times while reading that your body remembers them.
It can even feel as though your hand and fingers moves automatically, guided by the memory built through thousands of reading experiences.
So… where does grammar fit into all of this?
If the four skills are so interconnected, what role does grammar actually play?
Most students assume that explicit grammar knowledge — knowing rules, endings, and terminology — is essential to passing an exam.
It feels logical:
“If I want to pass the B1 exam, I need to master B1 grammar.”
But when we look closely at how exams work, the picture changes.
Exams Test Skills, Not Rules
Every exam — Goethe, TELC, ÖSD, FIDE — is built around the same four sections:
- Listening → understanding meaning in real time
- Reading → understanding meaning in written texts
- Speaking → expressing yourself in conversations
- Writing → expressing yourself in written form
And here’s the key: none of these tasks require explicit grammar knowledge.
There is no exercise where you’re asked to explain a rule or list all verb forms.
Exams measure whether you can understand and communicate meaning — not whether you can name the rules.
Implicit vs. explicit grammar knowledge
This is where the distinction becomes important:
- Explicit grammar knowledge = knowing the rules.
- Implicit grammar knowledge = having an internal sense of what “sounds right.”
And in almost every case, implicit knowledge drives performance.
Think about your native language:
When someone makes a mistake, your first reaction isn’t,
“Ah, they’ve violated the Konjunktiv II rule in line three.”
You just feel:
“Hmm… that sounds wrong.”
That feeling comes from hearing and reading correct patterns hundreds of times— not from memorizing rules.
The fill-in-the-blanks “trap”
Some exam tasks look like grammar tests, especially fill-in-the-blanks exercises.
But here’s the surprising thing:
Even a native speaker with zero theoretical grammar knowledge would get most of these right.
Why?
Because they feel which option fits.
When I personally, for example, correct these exercises for our students, I do the same:
I don’t start with grammar rules.
I look at the sentence and ask myself:
“Which option sounds better?”
Only afterwards do I rationalize it with a rule — if I need to.
Grammar rules explain why something is correct.
But they rarely drive the decision.
Pattern recognition does.
The bigger picture
And this brings us to an important conclusion:
Passing an exam isn’t about completing an A1, A2, or B1 course.
It’s not about memorizing more rules.
It’s about building a deep, practical understanding of the language — the kind that comes from listening, speaking, reading, and connecting patterns until it just feels right.
Someone who studies only up to A2 but has this deep, practical knowledge can often pass a B1 exam more easily than someone who “completed B1” but only learned rules theoretically.
In fact, many of my students pass B1 after learning only up to A2 with my ‘From Zero to C1’ learning system — see examples here and here.
And many pass B2 after learning only up to B1 — see examples here, here, and here.
So let’s conclude, in the end, passing an exam is less about the level you’ve reached… and more about the depth of understanding you’ve built.
Talk to you soon.
Bis bald.
Gruß
Manuel
P.S. Whenever you’re ready, here are 5 ways I can help you take your German to the next level.