🇩🇪 Best German websites for beginners

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.