The purpose of this paper is to investigate which difficulties Swedish students of German typically have and at the same time which structures they master without problems in order to give me, as a future teacher, some ideas how to create productive German lessons. Furthermore the students’ progression over the years is the main focus of this analysis. Students from the sixth grade up to the twelfth grade from two Swedish schools were asked to write essays which provide the corpus of this analysis. At the same time they were asked to fill in a questionnaire to conduct some, for the analysis, crucial background information. I begin my analysis by comparing the students’ essays within the classes and after that the essays of the different classes are compared with each other. At last a comparison with essays that were written as part of the national test during the late 90s will be made in order to find out whether students’ skills in German have changed over the years. Some theories concerning second language learning, for example Processability Theory, will be tested whether they apply for my test group or not.