ÖSD B1 · CHEAT SHEETS
Five sheets. The grammar — plus the Austrian and Swiss words.
ÖSD B1 is marked on Erfüllung, Kohärenz, Wortschatz and Strukturen — the same four criteria as Goethe's paper, on the same grid. What differs is what you hear. Four sheets cover the grammar: Konnektoren and Satzbau, the tenses with Passiv and Konjunktiv II, Präpositionen and Kasus, and the nominal style of ads, Hausordnungen and Bedingungen. The fifth is ÖSD's own: the pluricentric vocabulary (Kassa, Velo, Bankomatkarte, Sackerl, Perron, Jänner) that the Austrian and Swiss voices use, with the Redemittel for all three oral tasks.
- 0111 REGELN
Konnektoren & Satzbau · Kohärenz is one of four criteria in every writing task — this is how you buy it
ÖSD B1 marks every Schreiben task on four criteria, and Kohärenz — how well the text is stitched together — is one of them. Connectors are therefore the highest-yield grammar in the paper: you can survive a thin word field, but a text made of seven unconnected main clauses reads as A2 and caps the band before the examiner reaches the content. Learn these as POSITION rules, not as vocabulary, because the connectors themselves are easy and the position is what gets marked.
- 0212 REGELN
Zeiten, Passiv & Konjunktiv II · Three systems the ÖSD paper tests in every module
B1 keeps the two past tenses you already know and adds two systems on top of them: the Passiv (rules, processes, official texts — Lesen Teil 5 is built on it) and the Konjunktiv II (wishes, polite requests, unreal conditions, and every suggestion you will make in Sprechen Teil 1). The Präteritum stops being a small exception as well: from B1 on it carries the narrative past in Lesen Teil 1 and in the Hören Vortrag.
- 0310 REGELN
Präpositionen & Kasus · Where the a/b/c items hide — and where case errors still cost the band
Lesen Teil 5 and Hören Teil 1 are full of institutional German, and institutional German runs on prepositions: the case they demand, and the ones that look identical while governing different cases. At B1 the two new risks are the Genitiv prepositions (wegen, trotz, während, statt) and the fixed verb + preposition pairs that the multiple-choice options deliberately swap. Learn the pairs with the case attached, never separately.
- 0410 REGELN
Nominalstil, Relativsätze & Anzeigensprache · Lesen Teil 3 und Teil 5 lesen sich wie eine andere Sprache — hier ist sie
ÖSD Lesen Teil 3 gives you seven everyday situations and ten ads; Teil 5 gives you a Hausordnung or a set of conditions with four a/b/c items. Both are written in compressed nominal style: no subject, no verb, compound nouns stacked three deep, and conditions expressed as participles. Decoding that register is not vocabulary work, it is a reading technique — and this sheet is the technique, with the ten word-building patterns the ads actually use.
- 0512 REGELN
Register, Redemittel — und das Österreichische im Hörtext · The ÖSD-only sheet: what the Austrian and Swiss voices say, and how to answer them
ÖSD Zertifikat B1 is the same grid as Goethe's, and it is not the same exam to listen to. The Hörtexte are spoken in German, Austrian and Swiss voices, and the official Modellsatz shows the register in every text: reader letters from Graz, St. Gallen, Winterthur and Cuxhaven, ads that print Kassa, Bankomatkarte and Velo, Swiss ss in Ausserdem and Grüsse. None of that is dialect — it is standard pluricentric German, and it is the reason a candidate who only ever rehearsed German-German material can lose items without knowing the language was ever the problem. This sheet is the vocabulary pairs plus the Redemittel for all three oral tasks and the three writing tasks.