Goethe-Zertifikat A2 · Lesen — format and strategy
What this part tests
A2 Lesen moves you on from the isolated signs and labels of A1 to short connected texts, and the questions move with it: the information you need is still concrete, but it now sits inside longer sentences and is usually reworded rather than quoted. A passage may say that a course is already full while the item asks whether you can still join — same fact, different words, and the exam is testing whether you noticed. Three of the four parts are built the same way, five questions with three options each, so disciplined elimination is worth as much as instant recognition. The fourth part changes shape: five readers with different needs are matched against a pool of six short notices, which means one notice in that pool answers nobody. All four parts share thirty minutes. Lesen is also one of the three written parts Goethe judges together — forty-five of those seventy-five points have to come in, on top of sixty percent overall — so a point dropped here is a point Hören or Schreiben has to recover.
Exam format
Verified against the certifying body's published rules and sample booklet.
| Teil | Task | Items | Options | Words |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Multiple choice | 5 | 3 | — |
| 2 | Multiple choice | 5 | 3 | — |
| 3 | Multiple choice | 5 | 3 | — |
| 4 | Matching | 5 | 6 | — |
- Time:
- 30 min
- Points:
- 25 points
- Pass mark:
- ≥ 60%
Strategy
Read the item before the text and turn it into a question you can carry with you — can I still register on Sunday? is something your eyes can hunt for, whereas a half-skimmed paragraph is not. Because A2 rewords rather than repeats, practise matching meaning instead of letters: a line promising that admission costs nothing settles an item about a free event even when the two share no vocabulary at all. In the three-option parts, work by disproof — two of the three are wrong for a reason that is visible somewhere in the text, and locating that reason is quicker and steadier than talking yourself into whichever option feels right. Save the awkward readers in the matching part for last: with six notices covering five people, one is a decoy, and it will keep looking plausible until the straightforward pairs are gone and it is the only thing nobody wants. Spend the thirty minutes unevenly on purpose — bank the quick answers first, then reread for the stubborn ones — and leave nothing blank, because an empty line is the only answer guaranteed to earn you nothing.
Worked example
___ ich klein war, wohnte ich in Berlin.
- Als
- Wenn
- Wann
Reading at A2 often turns on a single word at the very front of a sentence. The writer is telling you about a period of living in Berlin, and the gap has to say how that period is framed: one finished stretch of the past, not something that kept happening. German marks exactly that with Als. Wenn would make it habitual or conditional — here that would mean something like every time I was little, plainly not the intended sense — and Wann is the question word, at home only in a direct or reported question. The distinction reaches well past grammar: in a reading text als signals that something happened once, while wenn signals it happened whenever a condition held, and a comprehension item can hang entirely on which of the two the writer meant. The answer is Als.
Practice
Der Mann kauft ein neues Auto, weil sein altes Auto ___.
___ Montag fährt der Vater mit dem Zug zur Arbeit.
Von allen Kindern ist Tom ___.
Die neue Wohnung gefällt ___ Frau sehr gut.
More practice
Official sample papers
The structure above is read directly from these free official documents — we link them, never copy them: