How to prepare for the Einbürgerungstest / Leben in Deutschland test

The test known as the Einbürgerungstest or the Leben in Deutschland test asks 33 questions from an official catalogue of 310, and you need 17 right answers to pass. The catalogue is published by the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (the federal office for migration and refugees) in two parts, Teil I with the 300 general questions and Teil II with the ten questions of your Bundesland, in the book's case Rheinland-Pfalz. Three of your 33 questions come from your Land's ten, the other thirty from the general pool.

The real obstacle is language. Words like Meinungsfreiheit (freedom of expression) or verfassungswidrig (unconstitutional) are B1 words with whole ideas folded inside them, and a candidate who can read the question and its options in German has usually already found the answer. The preparation below is therefore built on three habits, learning words as families, learning the history once as a story, and reading the catalogue in German, field by field, until the English lines are no longer needed.

What the catalogue asks

The 310 questions fall into fourteen fields of very unequal size. Elections alone are above thirty questions, and the history of division and reunification is nearly fifty, the largest block of all, while the republic's symbols take eight. The table gives each field with the shape its questions take.

Learn the words as families

The catalogue's vocabulary is built by gluing a root to a front word, so one root learned well unlocks a dozen words. Das Recht (the right, the law) gives das Grundrecht (basic right), der Rechtsstaat (state under the rule of law) and das Wahlrecht (the right to vote). Wählen (to vote, to elect) gives die Wahl (election), wahlberechtigt (entitled to vote) and die Wahlbenachrichtigung (polling notification). Der Bund (the federation) gives Bundestag, Bundesrat, Bundeskanzler and Bundespräsident.

Learn each noun whole, with its article and its plural, because on test day you will not be translating, you will be recognising. The page the words the questions are made of collects the fifty recurring words, family by family, with an example sentence for each.

Learn the history once

Dozens of questions ask for dates and names from 1933 to 1990. Read as one story they become guessable, because the answers follow a pattern. The regime of 1933 to 1945 was a dictatorship, its elections were not free, its crime was murder, and the 8th of May 1945 was a liberation, so where the options offer a softened version and a dark sober one, the dark sober one is correct. The division after 1945 runs in four acts, occupation, two states, the Wall, and the peaceful revolution, and the dates in the table carry almost every question in both fields.

Work through one field at a time

Preparation goes field by field, and each field follows the same four steps. The order matters, because the words only stick once the idea behind them is in place, and the catalogue only becomes readable once the words are.

• Read a short scene in which the field's words are used in conversation, first for the sense, then for the highlighted German words. Those words are the field's targets.
• Learn the field's word list actively, article and plural included. Words that appear in the official questions or answers are test-critical, and their neighbours round the German out.
• Read the history behind the field, because the test quietly assumes it. Why asylum is a basic right, why the president is not elected by the people, why the five-percent threshold exists.
• Open the official catalogue and read the field's questions in German. When you can read them without any English, the field is done.

The catalogue also rewards a few habits of elimination. In a neighbour question, cross out any country that does not touch Germany, since the nine neighbours are Dänemark, Polen, Tschechien, Österreich, die Schweiz, Frankreich, Luxemburg, Belgien and die Niederlande. When a question asks who helps an employee in trouble, the answer is almost never the police and almost always the Betriebsrat (works council), the Gewerkschaft (trade union) or the Arbeitsgericht (labour court). For the questions that ask current names, such as the chancellor, check the edition of the catalogue you hold, because those answers change with elections.

The Land questions

Three of your 33 questions come from the ten questions of your Bundesland, and they are the easiest points on the paper, because everything transfers from the general fields. Every Land has a Landtag (state parliament) and a Ministerpräsidentin or Ministerpräsident (head of the Land government), and no Land has its own Außenminister (foreign minister), because foreign policy belongs to the federation. For Rheinland-Pfalz, the Land the book covers, the facts fit in one table.

Where this comes from

This page condenses the opening chapter How to use this book of Leben in Deutschland: Der Wortschatz zum Test by Anju Mishra, together with the openings of its fourteen topic chapters and the date lines of chapters 8 and 9. The book is organised in two parts. The Topics, chapters 1 to 14, cover the catalogue field by field, each built as a vocabulary chapter with a scene, a word list and a history box. The Lessons, chapters 15 to 19, are five briefings in plain English, Von Bismarck bis Weimar, Von Weimar bis 1945, Von der Teilung zur Einheit, Wie der Staat funktioniert and Wer wählt wen, which tell the history and civics the questions assume.

The full book adds what this overview only names, every field's complete word list with article, plural and example sentence, the scenes in which Amir learns the words at Lena's kitchen table in Mainz, and the history boxes that make dozens of questions guessable instead of memorised. The free sample of the book contains the first two chapters complete, the Basic Law and the state organs.

Continue with

• Leben in Deutschland test: the words the questions are made of
• Der, die or das? The endings that decide German gender