Well....Germans have their opinion on this and it varies. However, the only opinion that matters is the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF).
Their basic description here is that you need to be versed enough, to understand simple German sentences....introduce yourself in a group....go out into a grocery store and shop....take and answer basic questions...ask directions (even if you have a smart-phone with a GPS map showing you the way), and fill in bureaucratic forms.
So you look over the list I just gave you, and it begs questions.
First, the bureaucratic forms. When the Auslander (Foreigner) office hands you the visa application form.....it's roughly a dozen pages asking you various detailed information. Some is useful (I admit)....some is worthless, (asking me about my relatives, who aren't coming or part incoming situation) it's is a waste of effort. But you have to be looking at the precise way they ask the question, and give only what they need. Turning the dozen-page application into a thirty-page 'answer' would be the wrong effort on your part.
Second, even my German wife would admit that shopping at some local German grocery requires tons of extra skills that BAMF never discusses or talks about in public. She would lecture me for hours and hours, about how to buy things only on sale, or how to avoid these certain products because they are inferior, or how product X should only be brought in this particular season. If I used my wife's guidance, it'd amount to a 700-page book on shopping, and Syrians would probably run out of the room in a panic because of the massive amount of guidance involved.
Third, on asking and getting directions. Germans would readily admit...in the 1960s to the 1990s....direction questions and answers were a common part of everyday life. I can remember in the 1990s having some German stop me on the street (assuming I was a native) and asking about such-and-such 'park' (which I happened to know), and I proudly gave them a 20-second piece on how to reach this destination. I would imagine in the 1970s....most Germans were confronted with this 'lost' dilemma at least twenty times a year. In the past decade? It's almost disintegrated....with the arrival of smart-phones, and GPS mapping tools. When you do have a German looking lost, it's a 99-percent chance they don't have a smart-phone, and they are over the age of fifty.
Fourth, this introduction business is simply one door leading onto another door, leading onto another door. There's this thread of an introduction that you learn, which has basically seven to ten introduction elements. You always address what village you live in....where you came from originally (your homeland)....your 'wishes' in life....what languages you speak....and your profession or former job in life. After about eight months in an intense language class, you've memorized the typical introduction, and as long as it stays upon that line, then it's fine. In the grand test to assess my introduction skills....the two old German test-gals went way beyond the normal questions, and I found myself having to explain at least a dozen things that had never occurred to me as being in the next question 'batch'.
Fifth, finally I come to announcement training. It's a rather comical thing but a fair amount of language training involves tapes run of train stations or radio stations. So this radio piece will be running....telling you a dozen traffic jams in the local area, and the question at the end will be....what's the situation on Autobahn 7, with four possible answers. One of the answers will be that Autobahn 7 was never even mentioned. Then you start to go back over the one-play only of this tape in your mind (that's all you get in the test phase), with a dozen references to traffic jams....realizing that '7' was never mentioned.
The train station tape? If you've ever been in any major train station in Germany....you know the echo effect. You could play that one single 20-second tape over a dozen times, and maybe get the jest of this....that the train set for track 2 has now been moved to track 3, and will be twenty-five minutes late. Most Germans have readily given up on the speakers, and they go to the central point to see the big board, and the notes on the board show the right track, and corrected time. Of course, this is another technology development over the past twenty years, and demonstrates that Germans readily hated the speaker system because of the echos.
I admit, you need some standards. But I think society and culture is under rapid change, with technology dissolving away standards that were important twenty years ago, and today....aren't worth memorizing.
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