Goethe A1 Writing Part 1: Filling In the Formular

Five gaps, five marks, and no sentences to compose. The form vocabulary to learn, the four traps that cost candidates the easy marks, and three worked examples.

Schreiben, Teil 1 is the friendliest task in the A1 exam. You read a short text about a person, and you fill five gaps in a form with information taken straight out of it. Nothing has to be composed. Nothing has to be conjugated. Most answers are one word, and that word is already printed somewhere in front of you.

Which is why the marks that get lost here are so annoying. They go on four things: copying the wrong one of two similar facts, missing a kein, miscounting people, and running out of time because the information was not in the order the form asks for.

What the task looks like

The writing section has two tasks, and this is the first:

You get a short text — a friend's situation, a booking, a registration — and a form with some fields already completed and five left blank. Everything you need is in the text. Then you copy your five answers onto the Antwortbogen, which is the only sheet that gets marked.

(Formats do change; confirm the current one on the Goethe-Institut's site before your exam.)

Learn the field names first

You cannot fill in a field you cannot read, and the same words come back exam after exam. This is the highest-value vocabulary list in the whole A1 syllabus, because it is short and it repeats:

Two of these are worth memorising with particular care, because they look alike and mean different things: Geburtsort is where you were born, Wohnort is where you live now.

The four traps

1. Two places, one gap

The text will often name the country or city someone comes from and the city they live in now. The form asks for one of them.

Ihre Freundin Mariam Haddad kommt aus Beirut. Seit zwei Monaten wohnt sie in Hamburg.

Wohnort is Hamburg. Beirut is where she is from, and it belongs in Geburtsort or Staatsangehörigkeit if the form asks — never in Wohnort. The giveaway verbs are kommt aus (origin) versus wohnt in / lebt in (residence).

2. A kein that decides the answer

Herr Wagner hat keine Kreditkarte.

The form offers bar and mit Kreditkarte. The text mentions the credit card — and denies it. So the answer is bar. Any time a form gives you two options and the text names one of them, check for a negation before you tick it; that is exactly why the sentence is there.

3. Counting people

Ihr Freund Peter Wagner fährt mit seiner Frau und seinen drei Töchtern (5, 8 und 11 Jahre alt)
nach Dresden.

Anzahl der Personen is 5 — the three daughters, the wife, and Peter himself, who is easy to forget because the sentence is written from his side. Davon Kinder is 3. Count on your fingers; it is not a comprehension question, it is an arithmetic one.

4. Termin means a day or a date

Whenever a field ends in -termin or -datum, you are looking for a weekday, a date or a date range — nothing else. Scan the text for one and ignore everything in between. If the field is Kurstermin and the text says vom 1. bis 21. März, that whole phrase is the answer.

Three worked examples

1. At the doctor's

Ihre Freundin Mariam Haddad kommt aus Beirut. Seit zwei Monaten wohnt sie in Hamburg. Sie ist 31
Jahre alt und arbeitet als Krankenschwester im Krankenhaus. Seit Montag hat sie starke
Kopfschmerzen.

arbeitet als … and hat eine Stelle als … are the two phrases that hand you the Beruf. Learn both.

2. A booking

Ihr Freund Peter Wagner fährt mit seiner Frau und seinen drei Töchtern (5, 8 und 11 Jahre alt)
nach Dresden. Im Reisebüro hat er für nächsten Sonntag eine Stadtrundfahrt gebucht. Herr Wagner
hat keine Kreditkarte.

Note that the answer to the last gap sits in the last sentence, and the answer to the second-to-last gap sits in the middle one. Which brings us to the method.

3. A course registration — and the crossing-out method

Ihr Freund Daniel Costa wurde am 12.04.1998 in Lissabon geboren. Er möchte vom 1. bis 21. März
einen Deutschkurs machen. Er hat schon drei Monate Deutsch gelernt. Er hat nur vormittags Zeit.
In der Schule hat er Französisch gelernt.

The form already shows Familienname: Costa, Vorname: Daniel, Geburtsdatum: 12.04.1998.

Start by crossing out everything the form already knows. Strike through Costa, Daniel and 12.04.1998 in the text. The text you still have to search just got shorter, and it keeps shrinking as you go:

That last row is the point of the method. Fremdsprachen was the hardest gap to find at the start; by the time everything else was crossed out, one sentence remained and it was obviously the answer.

Two habits inside that example are worth naming:

• Related fields sit close together. Geburtsort was next to Geburtsdatum. If a field belongs to a group, look where its neighbours were.
• Fill the easy gaps first, in any order. The information is not given in the order the form asks for it. Answering gap 1, then 4, then 2 is normal and costs nothing.

The method, in order

1. Read the form before the text. Know what you are hunting for.
2. Read the text once, marking every number, name, date and place.
3. Cross out what the form already contains.
4. Fill the gaps you can see immediately, in any order.
5. Go back for the rest — with most of the text crossed out, the remaining sentences are the remaining answers.
6. **Copy onto the *Antwortbogen*** and check the spelling of every word against the text.

Two rules for what you write

Copy exactly. The answer is almost always printed in the text, so there is no reason for a spelling mistake. Capital letters count: German nouns are capitalised, and Französisch, Krankenschwester and Hamburg all keep their capital in the box.

Answer the field, not more. If the field says Beruf, write Krankenschwester — not Sie ist Krankenschwester. A form takes words, not sentences. Writing a sentence wastes the time you need for Teil 2, which is worth twice as much.

Once the form is done, the second half of the section is the short email — we covered the whole task, formal and informal, with three model letters. The rest of the exam is in the same series: the reading section and the speaking test.