Most advice about the German speaking exam is guesswork: “they will ask your opinion”, “prepare debate topics”. We wanted to know what examiners actually do. YouTube has many full recorded oral exams, telc, Goethe, ÖSD, DTZ, from A2 to B2, so we pulled the transcripts of 73 of them (about 18 hours) and tagged every single thing the examiner says: 1,125 examiner turns. This page is the result, and the reason the AI examiner in testmydeutsch behaves the way it does.
The breakdown
- 27 %: “give me a concrete example / tell me more about that.” By far the most common move. You say “I like cooking”; they say “what did you cook last weekend, how do you make it?”. They want detail, not more topics.
- 20 %: openings (“tell us a bit about yourself”, “let’s start with your job”). The introduction is a bigger part of the exam than people think, and the easiest to prepare.
- 13 %: callbacks. The examiner comes back to something you said five minutes earlier (“you mentioned you moved here three years ago, why?”). This catches people who invent things early on.
- 11 %: “go deeper on what you just said.”
- 7 %: “let’s switch to a new area” (work → family → travel).
- 10 % closing, 4 % procedure (parts, timing, rules).
- And the ones everyone fears: opinion + why 3.7 %, counter-argument 1.6 %, hypotheticals (“what would you do if…”) 0.9 %. Even at B2 they are a small slice. You should be able to handle one, but drilling only “argue your opinion” while neglecting “describe a concrete thing from your life in detail” is backwards from what the data shows.
By level
- A2: 39 % of everything is “concrete example”. It is essentially an exam in describing your daily life precisely.
- B1: openings and callbacks dominate, they let you talk, then pull threads.
- B2: more “go deeper” (14 %) and slightly more opinion questions, but the bulk is still following your thread rather than throwing abstract topics at you.
What this means for your preparation
- Prepare 5–6 real, specific stories from your life (a trip, a problem at work, a hobby ritual) that you can describe in detail, in the past tense. Examiners will pull those threads.
- Never say something you cannot expand on. “I like sports” with nothing behind it invites a follow-up you cannot answer.
- Do not over-prepare abstract debate topics. One or two, fine, the exam is mostly about you.
- The introduction is free points. Write it, say it aloud twenty times, done.
Caveats
- This covers the free conversation. Structured parts (DTZ picture description, telc’s “plan something together”, the B2 presentation) have their own format and set phrases. The data shows what happens when the examiner is reacting to you, most of the exam time, not all of it.
- YouTube exams are partly demonstrations, not all real candidates. The tagging was done with a language model and spot-checked by hand; take the exact percentages as approximate. The overall shape is consistent across all three exam bodies.
How the AI examiner uses this
The examiner in testmydeutsch is not a chatbot that asks random B2 questions. Its behaviour is anchored to this corpus: it follows your thread and asks for concrete detail most of the time, comes back to things you said earlier, switches areas when a topic runs dry, and reserves opinion and hypothetical questions for the small share they actually have in real exams. It also borrows the form of real examiner questions rather than inventing textbook phrasing. Everything you say is transcribed and assessed against CEFR criteria afterwards, the goal is that the conversation feels like the recordings, not like a quiz.