Knowing that "der Schmerz" means pain does not help much when a patient is looking at you and you need the sentence. A shift doesn't run on single words. It runs on a small set of whole phrases you say again and again: the question at admission, the line before a check, the sentence at handover. Learn those as complete units and the words take care of themselves.
Here they are, grouped by the moment they come up.
At admission (die Anamnese)
| German | English |
|---|---|
| Wie geht es Ihnen heute? | How are you today? |
| Haben Sie Schmerzen? | Are you in pain? |
| Wo tut es weh? | Where does it hurt? |
| Seit wann haben Sie das? | Since when have you had this? |
| Nehmen Sie Medikamente? | Do you take any medication? |
During checks and care
| German | English |
|---|---|
| Ich messe Ihren Blutdruck. | I'll measure your blood pressure. |
| Bitte machen Sie den Arm frei. | Please bare your arm. |
| Ich gebe Ihnen jetzt eine Spritze. | I'll give you an injection now. |
| Bitte bleiben Sie ruhig. | Please stay calm. |
| Atmen Sie tief ein. | Breathe in deeply. |
At handover (die Übergabe)
| German | English |
|---|---|
| Der Patient in Zimmer 3 hat Fieber. | The patient in room 3 has a fever. |
| Der Blutdruck ist stabil. | The blood pressure is stable. |
| Die Medikamente wurden verabreicht. | The medication has been administered. |
| Es gab keine Auffälligkeiten. | There were no abnormalities. |
The temptation is to build each sentence word by word in your head before you speak. Under pressure that is slow and it shows. Practise the whole phrase until it comes out in one piece.
There's a name for why whole-phrase practice works better than assembling sentences from grammar rules.
Fluent speakers don't build most sentences from scratch. They reach for ready-made chunks, whole phrases stored and retrieved as single units. Michael Lewis built a whole teaching method, the Lexical Approach, on the idea that language is largely learned in these formulaic chunks, not assembled word by word from grammar. For a nurse under time pressure that is the difference between confident and halting. So drill "Haben Sie Schmerzen?" as one thing, the way you drill a phone number.
Michael Lewis, the Lexical Approach.
And drilling means producing it, not just reading it. Type each one from memory here.
Produce the phrases
Type the verb in brackets in the right tense: present perfect or past simple.
Keep going
If some of the words above are new, start with the ward vocabulary and come back. If you are earlier still, here is what A1 covers for a nurse and how to begin.
Sources & further reading
- Goethe-Institut: German for nursing care. Free official material built around real care situations.
- Council of Europe: the CEFR. The A1 to B2 levels employers reference.
- Formulaic language. Why fluent speech runs on stored chunks, not word-by-word assembly.
Written by
Builder at Lingoken
By day I build, and I love teaching kids to code. On weekends I dance, contemporary and Kathak. Languages are the thing I keep coming back to: I grew up between a few (Sindhi, Hindi, Marathi, English) and I'm still happily stumbling through Spanish, Telugu, and Malayalam. That slow, enjoyable business of actually learning a language convinced me practice has to be something you want to do, which is what we're building at Lingoken. I write here about making language activities people genuinely enjoy.
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