🇩🇪 The best courses for learning German

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.

Twice a week DW takes a current story and rewrites it at B1 level, then publishes the audio with a full transcript, a glossary of the harder words and comprehension questions. It is the natural companion to Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten: same newsroom, but here the German itself is simplified rather than merely slowed. Free, about three minutes an episode, and the printed materials make it usable as a proper study exercise rather than passive listening.

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.

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.

A scripted magazine feature — about German customs, work, food, regional habits — written at C1/C2 and published with the complete manuscript and a vocabulary list. This is the advanced end of DW's learner ladder and one of the few free resources aimed squarely at people past B2 who still want support. Free, roughly weekly, around eight minutes. The narration is clear, but the interview clips inside it are ordinary Germans at full speed, dialect and all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Short lessons — dialogues, grammar explanations, vocabulary sets — labelled A1 through C1 so you can start where you actually are, published steadily for years. The teaching is done largely in German with the difficulty scaled to the level, which makes it a reasonable bridge for learners who find Easy German too fast. Audio is free in any podcast app; worksheets, transcripts and the structured courses on the website are paid. Presentation is plain and the episodes are not always in order.

Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, with the monthly price falling steeply on longer plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 14 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.