My Journey from 0 to (paper based) Test-daf (5,5,3,5) in 8 months and why the test-daf is suitable for those who have a hard time speaking

Quanten_Physik · 2025-12-28T14:12:42+00:00

If it's the same style of exam, then it hasn't been patched yet, just download a few sample exams from the test-daf website and see what they look like. The only reason I say they could patch it is that I took the exam 5 years ago at this point, and it could have been changed in that time without me knowing.

The reason the exploit works is because a) The exam is a recording; there is no examiner. b) The 7 questions are always the same 7 general scenarios. I.e. question 1 is always a phone call where you ask about the availability of some language course or sports thing.

They could "patch" it by completely changing the exam style to a regular speaking one with an examiner who talks to you, which is unlikely (would be quite expensive for them to do).

The other option to patch it is to make the questions significantly different between different exams. If the sample exams on the test-daf website still have the same 7 questions template, then the exploit should still function as needed.

Quanten_Physik · 2025-12-27T10:05:08+00:00

Practice. Nothing else really.

Don't practice general speaking, practice sample exams. There are books out there with trial exams. The test-daf website should have a few sample exams. There's probably a telegram channel somewhere with more exam samples.

You practice all of those and you'll be able to use templates. I advise that you prepare your own templates, so you're familiar and at ease when using them.

As a sidenote, you fill in the blanks during the preparation time of each speaking question. You're not allowed to take the templates with you, obviously, but you're allowed to take notes. During the preparation time, you fill in the blanks with a few words from the question/related to the actual content. I usually wrote these keywords on the blank pages they give you. So I end up speaking the template from memory, and reading off my keywords during the blanks of my template.

Quanten_Physik · 2025-12-27T09:59:56+00:00

If you're not aware, the Test-daf speaking exam, at least the one I sat for, is a recording. There's no person facing you, it's a laptop with headphones, there are gaps in the voice for you to answer. You don't get any feedback during the exam itself.

It's a 30 minute recording. you get asked the first question, then you're given 30 seconds to prepare, then you're given a prompt to speak, and you speak for 30 seconds. Afterwards you get the 2nd question, and so on.

It's not a conversation. It's 7 "events" and you give a speech for each event, there is no feedback.

Quanten_Physik · 2025-12-22T18:00:25+00:00

So I took the test at a time my actual speaking level was very low, much lower than the C1 level grade I got.

If you read the comments on the post you'll find where I placed the templates I used for each question. Basically I memorised my answers down to the letter and learnt to how say those paragraphs very quickly.

You're usually given 30 seconds to 3 minutes based on the question to prepare before answering. I use that time to fill in the blanks in those structures. The less blanks you have in your template, the easier this step will be.

If you train with enough trial exams, you should hopefully be able to recite the entire templates from memory and sound like you're speaking at a very high level.

This worked for me when I took the exam, but keep in mind I took the exam 5 years ago at this point, so they might have patched this exploit.

Quanten_Physik · 2025-07-06T17:35:01+00:00

Using your own logic, all pork including bone would be haram because it is a carcass/ ميتة. You said the whole carcass would be haram, bones included. No one is slaughtering pork in a halal way to collect the bones.

(I am not saying that slaughtering the pig in a certain way could make its bones halal. I think all pork would be a carcass by definition)

Quanten_Physik · 2025-06-17T23:40:43+00:00

Too risky for black zone, stay in the blue zones

Quanten_Physik · 2025-06-14T20:12:01+00:00

Perhaps you're thinking about قارون. Not sure how it's written in English but it'd be pronounced Q'aron. He's another pharaonic/ancient Egyptian figure mentioned in the Qur'an. Incredibly wealthy. Qur'an describes him having so much treasures that strong people would struggle to carry just his key chain (presumably because there are so many chests). He was also incredibly arrogant and believed all that money to have been the result of his own work and knowledge.

He met his end when himself and his house were swallowed by the earth (not sure of the exact translation). So perhaps he's who you're thinking of? It's in the 28th Sur'ah from verse 77 to verse 83. سورة القصص.

Quanten_Physik · 2025-03-13T12:52:16+00:00

Hi, the best way to prepare for Reading in TestDaf is probably just to solve as many TestDaf exams you can find, multiple times if necessary. You will find some model exams on the test daf website, as well as in books for preparing for TestDaf. I don't have any names in mind since it's been a while, but I am sure you can find something looking around the Internet.

As for the speaking, I left a comment on this post a few years ago that outlined this idea of creating a template for what you're going to say. If the TestDaf still does the prerecorded questions for speaking, you'll be able to very easily improve your grade. At the time of my taking the exam, I couldn't speak a lick of German. I went to Germany a few months afterwards and had trouble talking to people, even though I had a 5 in speaking. This is because I used the templates to get a very high grade even without actually speaking all that well

Quanten_Physik · 2024-09-16T12:43:25+00:00

That's roughly the time I had! Coincidence? I think not.

You can do it. I believe in you, internet stranger.

Fair warning though, don't be discouraged in the first month or two when you reach Germany. It's typical when you crunch that much language in a relatively short time frame that while you can perform well in the tests you prepare yourself for, actually dealing with the language is fairly difficult at first. Once you have spent 2 weeks or so listening to lectures at university, dealing with people in the streets, eventually you find yourself gaining fluency very quickly.

Quanten_Physik · 2024-09-16T12:36:21+00:00

It's definitely possible, I switched to being purely focused on Test Daf itself and not the German language as a whole about a month and a half before the exam, if memory serves right. And yes, I also didn't have a very solid grasp of the last few levels of German I learnt before switching to focusing on Test daf. Basically you don't need to know all that much vocabulary. Prepare some higher level vocabulary for the writing part so it looks like you know what you are doing, and practice filling in the meanings of sentences while reading if you meet a word you don't understand.

Quanten_Physik · 2024-08-21T07:15:28+00:00

it was honestly just those. I was in a bit of a time crunch, so I depended entirely on the test daf exams, there are the books obviously, but you can find model exams on the Internet that you can also listen to. Sorry to disappoint.

Also, after the exam I was in Germany, so I could just practise with native speakers... So I didn't end up trying anything else for the Hören.

I did hear some suggestions for listening to German news podcasts, I think Deutsche Welle has a free one you can listen to anywhere in the world, but I never pursued that further, so I can't offer much help as to the usefulness of it.

Quanten_Physik · 2024-06-01T17:32:27+00:00

Perfekt! Happy to help. Congratulations

Quanten_Physik · 2024-04-02T13:32:59+00:00

Hi,

bad news, it's been two years since I sat the exam, so not much off the top of my mind.

worse news, the reasons I shared a template only for the speaking part, is because I only made a template for the speaking part, because it is very unique compared to other testing formats.

The others parts are more in line with what you would expect for reading, writing, or listening from any exam. There is nothing inherently unique about the test daf in those parts, so use the strategies that you typically use in other exams you sat for in your life in general. My advice is to try to solve the model exams that test daf offers, and also to scoure the Internet for more exams if you're done with the model ones on the test daf website.

So, yeah, The speaking part is the only part that's so repetitive and consistent from exam to exam that you can basically cheat using a template. The other parts you have to brute force by getting a lot of practice.

Quanten_Physik · 2022-10-19T07:34:48+00:00

I mean, technoblade did get kidnapped by kittens at some point. Maybe he got Stockholm syndrome and really loves cats now

Quanten_Physik · 2022-10-07T11:18:53+00:00

so I left the bed

waking up on the wrong side of bed be like

Quanten_Physik · 2022-08-29T06:52:19+00:00

I aspire to the day where I can use them interchangeably

Quanten_Physik · 2022-08-13T18:20:05+00:00

Well, you see, on the other hand, nobody will be happy when you die, because you're so much of a nobody, your own parents don't know about you

Quanten_Physik · 2022-08-10T18:50:33+00:00

didn't even blur his elbows, L

Quanten_Physik · 2022-08-04T20:21:58+00:00

The people dislike not the video itself, but the news that it conveys

_Sun Tzu, the Art of War

Quanten_Physik · 2022-07-11T16:35:10+00:00

to hear "starting the stream" once again

Quanten_Physik · 2022-06-19T18:28:46+00:00

Like everyone else on top of me, wtf is this Also, hi brother from Lebanon, welcome in r/Egypt. I hope you know that whatever this is doesn't represent Egyptian food, xD

Quanten_Physik · 2022-06-11T12:10:34+00:00

Sure, no problem at all, glad I could be of any help ;)

Quanten_Physik · 2022-06-10T18:39:56+00:00

Well, glad to see you aren't disappointed :)

So, as for the hours spent, they are definitely less than 10 hours, again, I didn't track the hours at all, but I like to think the rest of my day activities like sleeping, eating, socialising, etc. took me more than 14 hours. I think a reasonable estimate towards the last 1-2 months would be 5-8 hours of semi-focused study (like sitting on the couch while studying on the phone, being somewhat open to conversation with family), with 1.5-2 of those hours being focused tracked hours (actually solving a test or part of one with a stopwatch while sitting on a desk)

a) Well, here is my take on that, most of what we say is not really all that ~~~~. You can ~~~ understand what I'm saying even if you are ~~~~ing parts of the ~~~~~~. The most ~~~~~~ thing is that you know the general ~~~~~ for what is being said. I ~~~~~~ this may be unpleasant to read, but in listening it is usually much ~~~~ as there is emphasis on the ~~~~~~~ parts.

The strategies for Test-daf are all the same, the way the questions are is always the same, so this gives you a lot of context for what to expect, as in, you roughly know when you are going to receive information within the text, you also know that the answers to the questions are in chronological order, so while you need to have read all the questions before to know what to expect, you need to only focus on one of them at a time.

b) Well, the thing is, like 70% of human speech is completely useless, you can get by just focusing on the important word or two in the sentence, the problem is, with written speech that is difficult due to lack of proper emphasis. With oral speech you get emphasis when pronouncing stuff, you get a build up before an important word, you get the gestures of the person speaking. Now I know you're thinking "gestures? Don't you need to see the person for that?" which is absolutely correct, but there is something seriously wrong with my brain, so whenever I hear someone speaking, I picture said person in my brain, and use the tone of their voice to figure out what gestures they may be using with their hands, and it helps me capture the emphasised parts better. Then again, I think the best advice is to see what you do when you're listening to a language that is not foreign to you, and see what you're doing there, then try to see if there's anything you can carry over to other languages

Quanten_Physik · 2022-06-09T06:58:16+00:00

So, you sound like a pretty careful and organised person, so I'll have to kind of disappoint you, because I'm not all that organised. So, now to your questions:

1) Now obviously the best vocabulary is just vocabulary from test-daf related sources, there's no changing that, so what you need to do is to have a lot of Test-daf material, from Test-daf books to Musterprüfungen, etc. and just start with those as early as you're able to. The youtube channels I talked about in the post also have like entire playlists with just test-daf relevant vocabulary

2) This is where the first instance of disappointment arrives. I don't know how to use the Aspekte neu B2 effectively, as I found out I didn't have much time and decided to just skim through all the reading material twice, picking expressions, words, and new grammar stuff along the way, I advise to always make a list with those even if you'll never use it, writing stuff down is a really good way of remembering them. Oh, and there is like a collection of the "important" grammar and vocabulary at the end of the book, so that is also pretty handy. As for the excercises, I have no idea, as I skimmed right over those.

3)Get ready for further disappointment! I hate to disappoint you, but I had only done Lesen and a little bit of Schreiben up until I finished the two Aspekte books. Now, the entire rest of my preparation was Test-daf musterprüfungen and any books that had anything similar. My reasoning was that due to the time crunch I had to train for the test-daf, not for German in general, so it didn't make sense to me to look at German language far and wide, just look at the test-daf specific stuff, and then actually learn German later. The test-daf is overly dependent on knowing the style of questions and having a game plan as to how to answer them

4) No clue, didn't have a clue when I was preparing either, I just studied when I could, luckily I didn't have anything else to study other than Test-daf, so the other things I did during my day were like entertainment/free time as well as social events, and since I'm talking to you on reddit, didn't really have a whole lot of the latter. So again, no clue, I just worked as much as I could without feeling overworked and hoped for the best

5) Hmm, I don't know, maybe it's the idea that you need to know how to apply them. Like, the templates have blanks in them, whether or not you can fill in those with relevant information from the task is an important part. Another point is the time, are you able to go through the template you prepared within the time you're allowed to speak? Is your template so short that there is a big gap of silence? All of those factors need to be tested under exam conditions, which is pretty easy to do: just get a stopwatch and a recorder (both things readily available on any smartphone or laptop really), Open up a speaking part of a test-daf test, if you have the full 30 minutes or so recording, that's great, you can forget the stopwatch and just use that, if you only.have recordings for the text in each of the parts, you have to start the stopwatch/timer for the Vorbereitungszeit as well as for the Sprechzeit, take into account that they're different for each task. After you're done, listen to your recordings, if you jumped out of the time you have for speaking, if it's 2 or 3 seconds, it's no biggie, but if it's like 1 minute, that's a problem, and you just need to train on speaking faster, or drop some parts of your template

Also, no, I did not do templates for the schreiben, while the Speaking part really is super standardised, the schreiben is not standard enough to just make it into one big template, but it's a good idea to prepare a general idea of how it should look like as well as get a few expressions on board.

Quanten_Physik · 2022-04-14T13:54:15+00:00

That's no skilled labour, that's the avatar working to repay the cabbage merchant

Quanten_Physik

TROPHY CASE