The same 45 minutes of German teaching in Berlin can legally cost you nothing, 80 cents or 10 euro. Up to B1 the Volkshochschule price is capped by a federal number and nobody gets a discount. Above B1 the cap disappears and the discounts come back. Here is what each route really costs.

A guest told me she had eaten supermarket fruit for two days because every Berlin counter answered her celery question with a shrug. She had it backwards: fourteen allergen categories are compulsory in Germany, the duty covers unpackaged food at an Imbiss or bakery counter, and the written record has to be there for you to see. Here is where celery and mustard actually hide in Berlin food, what glutenfrei legally means, and the two German sentences that get you a real answer.

Somebody says halb acht, you arrive at half past eight, and the table is gone. Berlin runs two clocks at once: everything written uses 24 hours, and almost everything spoken drops back to twelve and then counts towards the hour that has not arrived yet. Here is the one shift that makes German time make sense, the eastern viertel and dreiviertel forms you will hear around Berlin, the day codes on a museum door, and a dial you can turn to test all of it.

A German bakery order is short and follows the same pattern every time. Here is the one sentence that starts it, the Berlin words phrasebooks miss, the questions they ask back, and what to do when your German runs out.

German numbers come at you fast in Berlin: a price at a bakery, a platform called out at Hauptbahnhof, the deposit on a bottle. This guide covers the one rule that makes them click (the small digit comes first), how prices and the comma work, what Gleis and the line numbers mean, and an interactive tool to build and hear any German number.

The first German you hear in Berlin is a recorded voice on the train. Here is what Zurückbleiben bitte, Nächster Halt, Ausstieg rechts and Ersatzverkehr actually mean, why the S-Bahn plays that little three-note chime, and the one word that tells you the train is about to terminate.

German station names can look like someone sat on a keyboard, but they are more predictable than they seem. Here is how to pronounce Berlin station names, built around the stops you will really use, with plain respellings and the sounds that catch visitors out.

A simple tourist guide to Pfand in Germany: how bottle deposits work in Berlin, what 25 cents means, where to return bottles, and what to do if the machine rejects them.