German for You Intermediate: Business Language & More

Formal German is not only used at work but also when we make appointments, talk to service providers of all kinds, when we communicate with doctors, landlords/landladies, building managers, school/university staff and so on.

Formal German and business language is different from everyday language. How German business language is different from general German is one thing you will learn in this course. This knowledge is essential for your language acquisition because you need to know on which areas of the language you have to concentrate.

We will look at the way people address each other in a formal context, at commonly used vocaulary and also more specific alternatives, phrases and expressions. You will be able to apply these in various situations, correctly and in an adequate context. Plenty of example are given in this course, always with an English translation, so you can see the most natural way to say those things in German.

I also included an overview of the grammatical structures that are more commonly used in a formal context and that you probably don’t need as often in everyday life. Depending on your level, it might be either a revision or at least include some familiar components, or it might be quite a bit more than you have studied before, but remember that you can always come back to this course and go through specific lectures later.

For each lecture, there is a downloadable pdf-version of the lecture presentation slides. You can access it by clicking on the ‘Resources’ button of each lecture on the right side of the video player in the chapter/lecture overview.

Of course, E-mail writing and talking on the phone are also a topics that are included.

Apart from specific areas of language acquisition, I will also give you some additional information to enable you to keep on studying after having completed this course.

Generally, on a solid A2 level this course should be manageable and in parts challenging, on level B1 it will definitely fill some gaps and include new material, and on B2 it should still contain plenty of new terms and phrases, though the structure and some vocabulary will be more for polishing up your knowledge. (The explanations are in English because it is aimed at a range of levels, including the ones that are usually not as far in understanding spoken language well enough to follow explanations in German.)

Who this course is for:

• Intermediate, higher intermediate and advanced students of German
• Students of German who want to be able to speak more formal and sound more competent, e.g. in writing
• Students of German who want to use German in a business environment