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What German Learners Actually Practice: Findings From 2,943 Real Situations (2026)

By Bengi Coskun, Co-founder, OGIMA · Last updated 2026-08-13

Every language course has a table of contents, and every table of contents is a guess about what learners need. Unit 4 is ordering in a restaurant. Unit 7 is booking a hotel. Somewhere near the end, if you are lucky, a page on formal address.

We have the opposite of a guess. In OGIMA, learners create their own practice situations — short, named conversation scenarios they want to rehearse out loud before facing them in real life. Nobody assigns these. Nobody grades them. Each one is a small confession about where a real person’s German (or Spanish, or French, or Italian) actually fails them. On 2026-07-07 we counted 2,943 of them across 27 communities, and this article is what they show.

To our knowledge this is the first published dataset of self-chosen speaking-practice scenarios. It looks nothing like a textbook.

Finding 1: 89% of everything is German

Of 2,943 situations, 2,626 — 89% — are German. Spanish has 145, French 98, Italian 68.

LanguageSituationsShare
German2,62689.2%
Spanish1454.9%
French983.3%
Italian682.3%

Some of that skew reflects where OGIMA’s users are — the app has a Berlin-flavored user base, and the methodology section below takes that seriously. But the size of the gap says something real anyway: the learners who live inside their target language, in a country that conducts jobs, housing, and healthcare in it, generate an order of magnitude more specific rehearsal demand than learners studying a language at a distance. Need creates scenarios. A holiday creates a phrasebook.

Finding 2: ~40% of all situations are ordinary everyday life

The three biggest communities are everyday life (715 situations), everyday Berlin (233), and expat life (224) — together 1,172 situations, roughly 40% of the entire dataset. For comparison: food has 139, tech 100, relationships 98.

What lives inside those clusters is strikingly small-scale. Real titles: Trading favorite drinks with the Späti owner. Debating cinnamon roll flavors in the office kitchen. Calling a neighbor for salt mid-snack. The creepy teddy bear in the Neukölln park. Picking the fastest U-Bahn route home at night.

Nobody rehearses the subjunctive. People rehearse Tuesday.

This is the single most useful finding for anyone deciding how to study: the conversations learners are most anxious about — anxious enough to write down and practise — are not the big performances. They are the two-minute unscripted exchanges that decide whether daily life in the language feels survivable. Which matches what the research on speaking has said for years: production under mild social pressure is its own skill, and it is the one courses train least. More on that in how to practice speaking a language.

Finding 3: travel barely registers

Here is what is not in the top clusters: travel. No travel community appears among the leading groups at all.

Now look at how the traditional apps are organized. Restaurant dialogues, hotel check-ins, asking for directions — the travel scenario is the load-bearing unit of Babbel, Pimsleur, and Busuu course design, and has been since the phrasebook era.

The mismatch is worth stating plainly: the people who need speaking practice most urgently are not tourists, and the scenarios built for tourists are not what they practise. A learner in Germany does not need the hotel dialogue. They need “No Schufa yet, but the landlord wants one” — which is a real situation from the dataset, and which no course has ever contained.

Finding 4: the distinctively German clusters are officialdom, housing, and formality

Beyond the everyday clusters, three groups of situations recur that are specific to life in Germany, and they are the anxiety topics:

Bureaucracy. City hall appointment, gone in seconds. Asking the tax office to explain the income form. Rejected for signing in the wrong ink. Five minutes to prove you belong here. The German of the Amt is a small, fixed, formal ritual — but it is high-stakes and unforgiving, and learners treat it as something to be rehearsed like a performance. (It is. That is why we wrote Bürgeramt German.)

Housing. No Schufa yet, but the landlord wants one. Roommate casting around the kitchen table. Good income, but no credit history yet. Finding a flat in a German city is a competition conducted in German, and the WG casting — a personality audition disguised as an apartment viewing — appears in the dataset as its own dreaded genre. See apartment hunting German.

Du or Sie. The formal-to-informal offer at work. Who offers the informal address first? The formality slip you can’t undo. The formality negotiation is a half-page in a textbook and a whole category in real life. Learners rehearse the offer, the acceptance, and — tellingly — the recovery from getting it wrong. See du or Sie.

What unites all three: fixed format, formal register, real consequences. These are the most rehearsable conversations in German precisely because they are rituals — and they are almost entirely absent from mainstream courses.

Finding 5: a profession cluster emerged on its own

Nobody built a nursing curriculum into OGIMA. Yet Doctors & Nurses is a top-seven community with 82 situations, created by healthcare workers rehearsing their working language: Running the code-blue response in the ICU. Checking the IV dose with the senior nurse. Paging the on-call physician at 3 am. Walking a confused patient to radiology. Simulated patient, real licensing panel — that last one is FSP and telc-exam roleplay, invented by the users who face it.

Germany employs roughly 306,700 foreign-national nurses — about one in five of the profession — and their language gate is real: B2 plus professional German, usually via the telc B1·B2 Pflege exam. The dataset shows what that population actually does about it when given a free-form tool: they rebuild their ward, conversation by conversation, and practise it. Professional German is not a niche add-on to language learning. For this group it is language learning. (The tools for it: best apps for medical German.)

What this means if you are learning German

Five practical conclusions the data supports:

  1. Practise Tuesday, not the exam. The conversations that decide how the language feels are the small unscripted ones. Narrate your day; rehearse the office kitchen, not just the presentation.
  2. Treat official Germany as a performance to rehearse. The Amt, the landlord call, the Krankenkasse phone call — fixed rituals, learnable scripts, disproportionate returns. Guides: Bürgeramt, doctor’s appointment, job interview.
  3. Give du/Sie its own practice time. Learners in the wild treat it as a category. Follow them.
  4. If your German is professional, train the profession. The nurses in this dataset are right: rehearsing your actual working conversations beats any general course.
  5. Ignore the travel unit unless you are actually travelling. The data says nobody who needs German for life is practising it.

Methodology, honestly

Because a dataset is only citable if you know what it is:

  • What was counted: learner-created practice situations in the OGIMA app — each a named conversation scenario with a description — as of 2026-07-07: 2,943 situations across 27 communities. Community counts cited above: everyday life 715, everyday Berlin 233, expat life 224, food 139, tech 100, relationships 98, Doctors & Nurses 82. Language split: German 2,626, Spanish 145, French 98, Italian 68.
  • What “counted” means: situation creation, not practice frequency. A situation practised a hundred times counts once.
  • Known biases: the user base is self-selected, skews toward people living in German-speaking countries, and is Berlin-weighted — the Berlin cluster’s size partly reflects the app’s home market. The 89% German share should be read with that in mind; the shape of what German learners rehearse (everyday > official > professional > travel) is the sturdier finding.
  • Example titles quoted throughout are real situation titles, lightly anonymized where needed, drawn from the public curated subset.

We will re-run the count periodically; the dataset grows daily.

Frequently asked questions

What do German learners actually struggle with most?

Judged by what they choose to rehearse: ordinary everyday conversations first, then official Germany — bureaucratic appointments, housing and the Schufa conversation, and the du-versus-Sie negotiation at work. Exam prep and travel phrases, the two staples of traditional courses, are nowhere near the top. The pattern suggests the hard part of German is not the grammar exercise but producing normal speech in small, unavoidable, mildly high-stakes moments.

Where does this data come from?

From 2,943 practice situations created by learners in the OGIMA app, counted on 2026-07-07 across 27 communities. Situations are short, named conversation scenarios that users write themselves in order to rehearse them out loud — so the dataset records what learners voluntarily chose to practise, not what a curriculum assigned. Methodology and limitations are described above.

Why is everyday small talk harder than grammar for German learners?

Grammar study is a solo activity with unlimited time; small talk is real-time production under social pressure with none. The dataset reflects that gap: learners overwhelmingly create situations about ordinary moments — the office kitchen, the Späti counter, the neighbour in the stairwell — rather than grammar topics. People rehearse what makes them nervous, and what makes them nervous is other people, not tables of endings.

Do language learners actually practice travel scenarios?

In this dataset, barely. No travel community appears among the top clusters, while everyday life, Berlin life, and expat life together account for roughly 40% of all situations. Traditional apps are heavily organized around travel — the restaurant, the hotel, the airport — which suggests a mismatch between how courses are structured and what learners who live in the language actually need.

Why are German bureaucracy conversations so heavily practiced?

Because they are high-stakes, strictly formal, and unforgiving of hesitation — and because appointments are scarce, so failing one costs weeks. Learners created situations like “City hall appointment, gone in seconds”, “Rejected for signing in the wrong ink”, and “Five minutes to prove you belong here”. The language itself is a small fixed ritual; the pressure is what people rehearse for.

What is the du or Sie problem in German?

German has a formal (Sie) and informal (du) address, and choosing between them is a live social negotiation with no reliable rule — conducted in the first seconds of every new relationship. Learners rehearse it as its own category: situations like “The formal-to-informal offer at work”, “Who offers the informal address first?”, and “The formality slip you can’t undo”. It is one of the clearest examples of a real difficulty that textbooks compress into half a page.

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