Listening · C1
Was macht einen Text wissenschaftlich?
An excerpt from an introductory lecture on academic language: traceability, precise terms, nominal style and cautious claims.
C1What makes a text academic?1 min 34 s6 questions
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Vocabulary
| German | English |
|---|---|
| die Nachvollziehbarkeit | traceability, transparency |
| eine Behauptung aufstellen | to make a claim |
| belegen | to provide evidence for |
| die Begrifflichkeit | terminology |
| unscharf | vague |
| der Nominalstil | nominal style |
| die Zurückhaltung | restraint, caution |
| abschwächen | to qualify, to tone down |
Useful expressions
| German | English |
|---|---|
| Vorweg: … | First of all: … |
| Es geht nicht nur um …, sondern darum, dass … | It is not only about …, but about … |
| Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass … | The results suggest that … |
Grammar in this recording
Nominal style
A clause with „weil“ becomes a noun phrase with „aufgrund“ + genitive.
- aufgrund des Anstiegs der Mieten
sich lassen + infinitive
Expresses possibility without a passive.
- Dennoch lassen sich einige gemeinsame Merkmale benennen.
About this recording
- Script
- German Prep editorial team. Original German Prep script. © German Prep. All rights reserved.
- Speech synthesis
- Piper TTS 1.8.0 (piper-tts, OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl) — GPL-3.0-or-later (licence of the synthesis software)
- Voice „thorsten“
- Model de_DE-thorsten-medium (MIT (rhasspy/piper-voices)), trained on Thorsten-Voice (CC0 1.0). Model card (opens in a new tab)
- Voice „kerstin“
- Model de_DE-kerstin-low (MIT (rhasspy/piper-voices)), trained on dataset-voice-kerstin (CC0 1.0). Model card (opens in a new tab)
- Automatic check
- Vosk (offline speech recognition), model vosk-model-small-de-0.15 (Apache-2.0): word error rate 7 % against the script on 9 October 2026. Some differences come from the small recognition model, not the audio.
- Human review
- Not yet reviewed by a human editor.
- Version
- Version 1, updated 9 October 2026
Pronunciation not yet reviewed by a person
Synthetic voices can stress or pronounce individual words unnaturally. If something sounds wrong, trust the transcript and tell us via the contact page.

