The short answer
Before the compulsory drives comes basic training: first the car, then easy roads, then real traffic. No regulation sets how many practice lessons that takes. Progress happens in recognisable stages, and which one you are in is something your instructor tells you after every lesson.
Between the first lesson and the test there is no steady climb but a handful of clearly distinguishable phases. Knowing which one you are in means measuring your progress against the right thing — rather than against the number of lessons so far.
1. The car
Moving off, changing gear, braking, steering — on quiet roads or somewhere nothing else is happening. This is purely about movement. Everything feels like too much at once, and that is the normal state of this phase. In an automatic it is shorter, because the clutch and the gears drop out.
2. Easy traffic
Residential streets, side roads, manageable junctions. The car now runs by itself enough for capacity to free up — and it goes straight into priority, where you look, and the mirrors. The giveaway for this stage is that gear changes suddenly fail again the moment a junction gets tight.
3. Düsseldorf city traffic
Multi-lane roads, trams, cyclists, junction after junction, pedestrians stepping out between parked cars. This is where operating a car turns into driving one: reading ahead, judging gaps, deciding before the situation forces you to. Most practice lessons sit in this phase.
4. Test material
- Parallel, bay and angled parking
- Turning in a confined space, reversing round a corner
- Emergency stop
- Hill start
These come up in the test and are therefore practised deliberately. They are not a measure of how well you drive — you can drive safely and still sweat over reverse parking. The reverse is just as true.
5. The compulsory drives
Only now do the twelve special drives make sense. Nobody still fighting the clutch learns anything on a motorway — which is why they sit at the end rather than in the middle.
How to tell you are progressing
Not by it getting easier — that takes a long time. By your instructor saying less, and by being able to describe afterwards what actually happened. Anyone who cannot remember which streets they drove was still busy operating the car.
If you notice after the test that practice is missing, that is not a setback and not a special case — that is what refresher lessons are for, years later too.