🇩🇪 How to learn German Deutsch

The flagship of the genre: unscripted interviews at native speed plus 'Super Easy German' episodes where the hosts slow down for beginners, all dual-subtitled so the same video works at several levels. It's the fastest cure for the shock of real German after textbook audio. Videos are free; membership adds interactive transcripts, exercises and a Discord community.

Two hosts discussing German life, language questions and current events at a natural but considerate pace — the closest thing to eavesdropping on real conversation with a safety net. Because it's unscripted it is harder than any 'slow German' show; B1 is a realistic floor. Free to listen; transcripts, vocabulary helpers and bonus segments are behind the membership.

Deutsche Welle publishes complete graded courses, placement tests, vocabulary trainers, Deutschtrainer clips and news formats like Top-Thema — all free, no ads, no upsell, available in dozens of interface languages. In terms of value per euro nothing else in German learning is close. The interface is dense and it's easy to wander rather than follow a path, so pick one course track and stick to it.

DW's flagship course follows Nico, a young Spaniard newly arrived in Germany, through a proper filmed storyline; each episode is followed by vocabulary, grammar and listening exercises. The narrative pull makes it far easier to keep going than a textbook, and it covers A1 through B1 completely. Free with an optional account for progress tracking — the single best starting point for a new German learner.

Real DW news copy, unsimplified in vocabulary but delivered at a deliberate pace, with a manuscript you can read along or check afterwards. Because the words aren't dumbed down it builds genuine news vocabulary, which makes it a natural next step after graded material. Free, daily, and there's a normal-speed version of the same bulletin to test yourself against.

Mark teaches and a learner asks the questions you'd ask, which is unusually effective for German's case system because you hear the confusion articulated before the answer. Free podcast audio covers the whole sequence; the paid course adds video, lesson notes and bonus material at a few hundred pounds per season. Fewer seasons than the French edition, so it thins out above B1.

Annik Rubens is a professional journalist and it shows — episodes are well-written short essays on German society, history and everyday habits, read slowly and distinctly. Still publishing in 2026 with 320+ episodes in the archive. Free to listen; the premium tier adds PDFs, transcripts, exercises and a separate 'Absolute Beginners' course series.

The German entry in the Innovative Language catalogue: every lesson pairs a short dialogue with a breakdown, PDF notes and word lists, spanning absolute beginner to advanced. Useful as a steady supplementary drip rather than a spine, and the perpetual-sale marketing is exhausting. Quality is uneven between series — sample the free lessons before committing to a plan.

Built with the Easy German team, Seedlang replaces text flashcards with short videos of native speakers, so you drill vocabulary and sentence patterns against real pronunciation and gesture. It also has structured grammar decks and Easy German episode tie-ins. German-only in practice, and the free tier is limited enough that you'll hit the paywall quickly if you use it daily.

Laura Bennett's whole premise is explaining the grammar machinery that apps skip — declension tables, the logic of the four cases, why adjective endings change — in a way that finally makes it click. Excellent for analytical learners who are stuck because nobody explained the system. Nothing here for listening or speaking, and the full German Foundations program is a substantial paid purchase; the free intro mini-course shows the style.

Formerly Learn German with Jenny — a large library of short videos explicitly tagged by CEFR level, each with a downloadable worksheet, so you can work through a level systematically instead of grazing. A big free YouTube presence funnels into the paid platform (€49 for 3 months, €89 for a year, €229 lifetime). The site now also offers French and English, but German is where the depth is.

Public radio's plain-language news service, originally for readers with cognitive disabilities, which makes it an unusually clean A2–B1 reading resource: very short sentences, a glossary for every difficult word, and audio for each article. Free and genuinely current. Coverage is a weekly digest rather than daily, and the deliberate simplicity means it won't stretch you past B1.

A free grammar drill machine covering 150+ topics A1–C1, with the unusual feature that you can filter exercises by the textbook and chapter you're using in class. No account required, no ads, instant correction. It's pure drilling — dry, no explanations to speak of — so bring your grammar understanding from elsewhere and use this to automate it.

The Goethe-Institut publishes 260+ free exercises through its 'Deutsch für dich' community, plus learner apps, films, and — most valuable — complete practice papers with audio for every Goethe-Zertifikat level. If you're aiming at an official certificate, these are the definitive prep materials. The site is a sprawl of regional subsites, so bookmark the specific page you need; actual courses and exams are paid.

Nearly 40,000 volunteer contributors have made this the go-to German-English dictionary for exactly the phrases Google Translate mangles — compounds, idioms, technical terms, Austrian and Swiss variants. Every entry shows gender, plural and usage tags, and there's an offline mobile app. Free; the crowdsourced nature occasionally shows in odd or unverified entries, so cross-check anything surprising.

LEO's real advantage over dict.cc is the discussion forum attached to entries: for any ambiguous word there's usually a thread where native speakers argue out the nuance, which is often more useful than the entry itself. Includes conjugation and declension tables and audio pronunciation. Free and ad-supported, with an interface that hasn't changed much in years.

Duden is what settles arguments about German spelling and grammar, and the online dictionary gives you definitions in German with declension tables, register labels, synonyms and etymology. Switching to it from a bilingual dictionary is a real milestone around B1. Core lookup is free; the Duden-Mentor writing corrector and some premium content are paid.

Enter a verb in any form and get every tense, mood, imperative and participle, with the separable-prefix and irregular forms clearly marked — the specific things that trip learners up in German. It also declines nouns and adjectives and generates printable worksheets. Free, ad-supported, and purely a reference tool with no teaching around it.

Cornelsen's series covers A1–B1 in one volume and B2–C1 in another, with 85 short chapters, visual explanations, level-appropriate vocabulary and audio/video accessible free via the PagePlayer app. The layout is built for working alone, and answer keys are included. Written in German throughout, so absolute beginners will want an English-language grammar alongside the first chapters.

Martin Durrell's Hammer is what university German departments use: exhaustive, precise, with attested examples and explicit notes on register and regional variation. It answers the edge cases every learner grammar waves away. It is a reference, not a course — dense, expensive, and useless for practice, so buy it only once you're past B1 and the shallow explanations have started failing you.

André Klein's Dino lernt Deutsch series is the best-known German graded-reader set, and this first volume is genuinely enjoyable rather than dutiful — Berlin flatshares, bad jobs, awkward romance. Each chapter has a German-English glossary and comprehension questions, with audiobook versions available. Vocabulary is deliberately narrow, so it's training wheels for reading, not authentic German prose.

Luzi and Johannes have taught German as a foreign language for over a decade and the channel reflects classroom experience: A1–B2 grammar explained carefully, plus the word-pair confusions (kennen/wissen, legen/liegen) learners actually hit. Entirely free with 260+ videos. Presentation is plain talking-head teaching — reliable rather than exciting.

Benjamin teaches entirely in clear German, covering the harder end of the grammar syllabus — Konjunktiv, passive constructions, Nebensätze, connectors — which is exactly where free resources usually stop. Doubles as listening practice because the medium is the language. Free on YouTube with paid courses alongside; the all-German delivery rules it out below roughly B1.

Mark Weber's channel applies the comprehensible-input philosophy to German — extended natural speech on everyday topics, pitched just above your comfort level, with no translation crutch. Good for learners who've done the grammar and now need volume of listening. Free; the upload pace has slowed considerably, so treat it as a strong archive rather than a weekly show.

Comprehensible input for the awkward B1 stage: topics are substantial enough to be interesting, delivery is slow enough to follow, and everything stays in German. Works well as podcast-style background listening once you can handle a few minutes without subtitles. Free; a small operation, so the catalogue is modest compared with Easy German.

A quietly good free library of short stories and dialogues at A1–B1, each with slow audio, the full text, and a grammar or vocabulary point drawn out afterwards. The 'story plus explanation' pattern is what most free sites get wrong and this one gets right. Free and ad-light; the site is small and updates rarely, so treat it as a finished collection to work through.

Written by a German teacher, this is one of the largest free German learning sites in German: level-sorted exercises, thematic vocabulary lists, listening tasks, Wortschatz-Bilder and prep material for Goethe and telc exams. Everything is free and there's no funnel to a paid product. Organisation is blog-shaped rather than curricular, so use the level tags and search rather than trying to read it in order.

ZDF's daily 10-minute news programme for kids happens to be an ideal A2–B1 listening resource: clear articulation, short sentences, and background explainers for anything complicated. Free to stream from the ZDF Mediathek with German subtitles available. Some episodes are geo-restricted outside Germany, and the framing is aimed at children, which not everyone finds tolerable.

Unmodified broadcast German at natural speed, but only 100 seconds long, which makes it a realistic daily habit and an honest gauge of how far you've come. Free from ARD with no account. There is no learner scaffolding whatsoever — no glossary, no slowdown — so this belongs after Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten, not instead of it.

DW's classic beginner audio course follows two journalists through a light mystery plot while a narrator explains vocabulary and grammar in English between scenes. Being audio-first makes it usable while commuting, which is rare for true-beginner material. Free with downloadable manuscripts and worksheets; it's an older production and sounds it, but the pedagogy is solid.

If you take a German course in Germany there's a good chance it uses Menschen or its Hueber sibling Schritte — communicative, image-heavy, with a Kursbuch/Arbeitsbuch split, audio and video. Buying the pair lets a self-learner follow the same syllabus a real class would. It genuinely assumes a teacher and classmates for the speaking activities, so half the book underdelivers if you're alone.

The Goethe-Institut runs in-person and online German courses worldwide and issues the Goethe-Zertifikat, the certificate most widely recognised by German employers, universities and immigration authorities. Teaching is professionally qualified and the exam pathway is unambiguous. It is among the most expensive options, and availability and scheduling vary a lot by country — check your local institute rather than the global site.

Emanuel writes essay-length pieces tracing how a German prefix or word family actually works — why 'aufmachen', 'ausmachen' and 'anmachen' mean what they mean — with jokes and exercises attached. For learners who want the underlying logic rather than a table, it's the best free German writing online. Most articles are free with a membership for exercises and archives; posts are long and the tone is chatty, which isn't for everyone.

Sprakuko's animated whiteboard style suits German's structural topics — case tables, word order, verb position — where seeing the sentence rearrange is worth more than hearing it described. Videos are short and taught in slow, simple German with on-screen text. Free with a large back catalogue; there's no coursework or practice attached, so pair it with a drilling site like DeutschAkademie.

Free on desktop, Android and web; the iOS app is a one-off paid purchase that funds the project. The interface is dated and the options are overwhelming at first, but nothing beats it for retaining vocabulary over years. Most effective when you stop grinding premade decks and start mining sentences from things you actually read or watch.

One-on-one video lessons from roughly $5–30/hr depending on the language and the teacher's credentials. It is the single fastest way to get real speaking practice, and the reason most self-study plans stall is that they skip this step. Community tutors are cheap conversation partners; professional teachers are worth it if you want structure, homework and error correction.

The free tier is genuinely usable (ads plus a limited 'hearts' system); Super removes both for about $96/yr. Its real value is streak-driven consistency for absolute beginners, and the smaller courses are thin machine-assisted content rather than the polished Spanish or French trees. Treat it as a warm-up habit, not a curriculum — nobody reaches conversational fluency on Duolingo alone.

Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, typically $10–15/month with big discounts on annual plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 13 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.

Thirty-minute audio lessons force you to produce sentences out loud before you see anything written, which builds unusually good accent and recall. Subscriptions run about $15–21/month (all-access covers 50+ languages), and older courses are often available through public libraries. It is slow and vocabulary-light by design, so pair it with reading — but for commute or walking time it is the best use of otherwise dead hours.

Import podcasts, articles or ebooks, tap unknown words for definitions, and LingQ tracks your known-word count over time. The free tier caps how many saved words you can keep, so serious use means paying (~$13/month or less annually). The interface is clunky and the built-in SRS is weaker than Anki, but the reading-plus-audio workflow with 50+ languages is hard to replicate elsewhere.

The 'learn with locals' video clips are the distinguishing feature — you hear real people at real speed rather than TTS. Be aware that Memrise moved user-created community courses off the main app in 2024 onto a separate site, which gutted what many long-time users valued most, and the app has leaned hard into AI chat features since. Fine as a phrase-and-vocabulary app for major languages; if you came for the community decks, use Anki instead.

Covers 14 languages along an explicit CEFR path, and its best feature is the community exchange: you submit short writing or speaking exercises and real native speakers correct them, free of charge, in exchange for you correcting theirs. The free tier is limited to core lessons; Premium unlocks grammar, offline and the full path. A solid Babbel alternative if you specifically want writing practice with human feedback.

Built on Tatoeba sentences, it drills words in context by frequency band across 50+ languages and 170+ language pairings, with a genuinely generous free tier. It explicitly starts where beginner apps end, so it is the natural 'what now?' answer for someone who finished a Duolingo tree. Sentences are crowd-sourced and occasionally awkward or oddly specific, and it teaches nothing about grammar explicitly.

Lessons build outward from real conversations with colour-coded literal translations and cultural notes, and the catalogue includes endangered and indigenous languages nobody else covers. Retail pricing starts around $10/month, but a very large number of public libraries and universities give patrons free access — check yours before paying. Content depth per language is modest, so it suits travellers and early learners more than people pushing toward B2.

Mihalis Eleftheriou records real lessons with a real student and walks you through constructing the language yourself using cognates and logic — Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Swahili are covered. Completely free, no ads, no sign-up, funded by donations. The Spanish course in particular is one of the most recommended free resources anywhere; the trade-off is small vocabulary and no reading or writing practice.

Each course is ~100 short bilingual dialogues with native audio: you passively absorb for months, then start an 'active wave' translating back into the target language. Books run around €30 (e-courses ~€50) across 70+ languages, and the method is a long-standing favourite among polyglots for reaching real reading fluency. Caveats: many courses are only published from French, the humour is dated, and it demands daily discipline with no gamification to carry you.

The 'Complete' books are proper structured courses with dialogues, graded exercises and downloadable audio, and the range covers languages no app touches. Quality varies noticeably by title and author, so check reviews for your specific language before buying rather than trusting the series name. Their graded readers and 'Script Hacking' alphabet guides are also worth knowing about for non-Latin scripts.

Over 70 languages, each a step-by-step beginner course written by an experienced teacher, and crucially all the audio is free to download from the companion site even if you find the book secondhand. Slightly more academic and grammar-forward than Teach Yourself, which some learners prefer. Like any book series the individual titles differ in quality; the less common languages are often the only decent course in existence.

You sit in on a recorded lesson with two students and build sentences aloud alongside them, with no writing, homework or memorisation; 19 languages are available. It is remarkably good at making the core grammar of Romance languages click in a few hours. Vocabulary coverage is small, the recordings are old, and the courses after Michel Thomas's death are taught by other teachers with mixed results — treat it as a fast on-ramp, not a course of study.

Built-in correction tools let partners fix your messages inline, and the social 'moments' feed gets you corrections from strangers without arranging a call. Free for the core exchange; VIP adds more translations and simultaneous target languages. The persistent caveat is that a fair share of users treat it as a dating app, and exchange partners are unreliable — it works best once you already have some output to correct.

Same idea as HelloTalk but with vetted profiles and a cleaner focus on actual voice and video calls, which makes it noticeably less spammy in practice. Free to use; Pro adds unlimited partner search and extra languages, and the app also sells paid tutors. Both apps live or die on finding one or two committed partners, so expect to message a lot of people before anything sticks.

100,000+ tutors across 120+ subjects, with a free replacement if your first tutor is a bad fit. The main structural difference from italki is that Preply pushes weekly lesson subscriptions and takes a large commission from tutors, which some learners consider a reason to prefer italki. Worth comparing side by side for your language — prices, availability and tutor quality differ per market rather than per platform.

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit: you shadow native audio, record your own version, and a real human coach returns feedback — 10 free submissions a month, unlimited for about $20/month, with full scholarships for anyone who needs one. Covers French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and English. It only fixes pronunciation and delivery, so it complements rather than replaces conversation practice.

Around 6 million words recorded by native speakers across 400+ languages, usually with several accents per word so you can hear regional variation. Free to search on the site; the paid tiers are aimed at API users and bulk audio downloads. Indispensable for names, place names and anything a TTS voice would mangle — many learners wire it directly into Anki for card audio.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

A Chrome extension that shows target-language and native subtitles simultaneously, lets you click any word for a definition, replay a line, and save phrases for review. The free tier already covers dual subs, dictionary lookups and the CEFR-graded video catalogue; Pro (about $6/month) adds machine translation, speech recognition and better AI lookups. It transforms passive Netflix time into study time, but you need enough of a base — roughly B1 — for subtitle mining to beat just watching.

The heavyweight immersion toolkit: one-click sentence mining with audio, screenshot and definitions, plus its own SRS and known-word tracking, for 11 languages including Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and the major European ones. A 10-day free trial then a subscription (roughly $10/month). Overkill unless you are committed to a sentence-mining routine — if that describes you it saves hours a week, otherwise Language Reactor's free tier is enough.

A browser extension plus web reader covering 100+ languages: click a word or drag across a phrase, get an inline translation, and it becomes a flashcard automatically. The free tier gives unlimited single-word translations but caps phrases and AI explanations at 10 a day; Premium is $6/month. Simpler and cheaper than LingQ or Migaku if all you want is frictionless reading of articles and ebooks.

You listen to and repeat thousands of native-recorded sentences on a spaced schedule, which builds fluent output patterns without explicit grammar study. It covers 60+ languages and keeps nine minority languages (Catalan, Welsh, Taiwanese, Kurdish and others) permanently free as a preservation effort. It is expensive at roughly $20–40/month, and the repetition is monotonous — most reviewers call it effective but overpriced, so try the 7-day trial first.

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

A franchise of local producers filming unscripted street interviews, each episode subtitled in the target language and English, which is the closest free thing to hearing how people genuinely speak. All YouTube episodes are free; membership adds transcripts, vocabulary lists and exercises. Real-speed unscripted speech is hard early on — start with the slower 'Super Easy' episodes if you are below B1.

Mark Pentleton teaches a genuine student while you listen in, across French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese and Gaelic. The podcast seasons are free on any podcast app and are structured as a real curriculum rather than scattered episodes; the Academy sells premium lesson notes, video and bonus audio. Ideal commuting material for beginners through B1, and the Spanish and French series are the strongest.

The default place to ask 'is X app worth it' or 'what should I do at B1' and get answers from people who have actually done it, plus per-language subreddits (r/Spanish, r/LearnJapanese, r/French) with far better resource lists. The wiki and FAQ head off most beginner questions. Expect strong ideological camps — comprehensible-input purists versus textbook people — so read a few threads before taking any single answer as settled.

A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.

Modern assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) will roleplay a scenario at your level, correct your writing with explanations, generate graded reading, and hold voice conversations — endlessly patient and available at 2am, which no tutor is. Free tiers are enough for text practice; voice modes generally need a subscription. The caveats are real: models are noticeably weaker and more error-prone in lower-resource languages, they tend to produce bland textbook register rather than how people actually speak, and they will not correct you unless you explicitly ask them to.

Type a word or phrase and it plays back real YouTube clips of people saying it in context, across 25 languages plus sign languages, so you get natural intonation and regional variation rather than an isolated dictionary recording. Free, donation-supported, no account needed. Complements Forvo: Forvo for single words, YouGlish for phrases and prosody.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

A streaming service where every show has clickable dual subtitles and saved words become flashcards, covering 15 languages with apps on phone, Roku and TV. It solves the 'what do I watch' problem for languages where Netflix's catalogue is thin. The library is much smaller than a mainstream streamer and it is subscription-only — if you already pay for Netflix, Language Reactor's free tier does most of the same job.

Thousands of public-domain books recorded by volunteers, downloadable as MP3 or M4B with no account. Pairing a LibriVox recording with the matching free Project Gutenberg text gives you a full audiobook-plus-ebook study set for nothing. Two caveats: recordings are volunteer-quality and vary a lot reader to reader, and everything is out of copyright, so the language is often a century old — great for literature, poor for modern slang.

Unlike most apps it is built around producing speech: you repeat, roleplay and converse with an AI tutor that gives pronunciation and phrasing feedback in real time. Covers Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Italian and Chinese for English speakers, with a 7-day trial then a subscription (roughly $20/month or $99/yr). Good for overcoming the fear of speaking before your first human lesson, but an AI will not push back or drift off-script the way a real conversation partner does.