German · Deutsch

Guided 97 resource listings .

German has full A1–C2 paths and on-site tools on this site — start with the level that matches your speaking, not your reading vanity. Last reviewed 2026-08-01

About German

Language family
Indo-European, Germanic, West Germanic
Where it's spoken
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg
Speakers
roughly 135 million native speakers
Writing
Latin

German descends from the West Germanic dialects spoken across central Europe and standardized gradually after Martin Luther's 16th-century Bible translation helped fix a common written form. It is the most widely spoken native language in the European Union. Its close cousin Dutch and its more distant cousin English share large amounts of core vocabulary and grammar with it.

Speaker counts are approximate orders of magnitude for learners, not census figures. Family labels follow Glottolog-style classification; vitality notes (when shown) follow UNESCO WAL / Ethnologue-style framing and should be re-checked for program planning.

Sources

How to start

  1. Pick one free course (or free-with-upgrades) below and finish a short beginner unit before hopping apps.
  2. Bookmark one dictionary or grammar reference and look up every unknown word for a week.
  3. Add 10–15 minutes of listening most days — news, radio, or a teaching channel.
  4. Drill vocabulary with First 500 words , then situational lists in topic decks .
  5. Go deeper with the Language Hacks – German series · Buy on Amazon.
  6. When ready, use a tutor marketplace listing below for short speaking sessions.

Some outbound links may earn us a commission. Commission never affects inclusion or ranking. Full disclosure.

Resource Type Levels Cost Verified
Dict.cc German
Crowdsourced DE–EN dictionary with audio.
reference A1-C2 free
Duden
Established Duden resource for German learners.
reference B1-C2 freemium
DWDS
Established Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences resource for German learners.
reference B1-C2 free
LanguageGuide German
Well-known learning resource.
reference A1-B1 free
Linguee German
Well-known learning resource.
reference A2-C2 free
Omniglot German
Well-known learning resource.
reference A1-B1 free
Oxford Languages German
Well-known learning resource.
reference B1-C2 freemium
PONS German
Well-known learning resource.
reference A1-C2 free
Reverso German conjugator
Well-known learning resource.
reference A1-C2 free
Tatoeba German sentences
Open bilingual example-sentence corpus.
reference A1-C1 free 2026-08-02
Verbformen
Established Verbformen resource for German learners.
reference A1-C2 free
WordReference German
Dictionary and learner discussion forums.
reference A2-C2 free

Know a better classroom-friendly resource for German? Suggest it with attribution.