Free German learning resources
11 free resources, checked and categorised.
No trials, no paywalls, no sign-up required.
German rewards early structure more than most languages. The four cases and the gender system are front-loaded — they feel arbitrary for the first month and then quietly stop being a problem once you have heard enough sentences to feel the patterns. So start with a structured course rather than app streaks, and accept a slow first few weeks.
The free material for German is unusually good: Deutsche Welle alone covers A1 to C1 with audio, video and graded news, and it is genuinely free rather than a trial. Pair one course with one dictionary and stay there until you finish it. Switching courses every fortnight is the most common way people spend a year on German and stay at A2.
Once simple sentences are comprehensible, add slow news and a podcast. German's long compounds look intimidating in writing but decompose predictably in speech, so listening often outpaces reading earlier than learners expect. Reading comes easiest through material you already know — a translated book you have read before beats a German novel you have not.
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A guide for beginners.
Vocabulary and grammar exercises, idioms, false friends and more.
Grammar and exercises.
Listening comprehension exercises - telling similar sounds apart etc.
Learn it there, practise it here
Free resources are great for input — reading, listening, explanations. They are weaker at the two things that actually move you forward: speaking German out loud, and remembering what you met once. That is what OwnSlides is for.
Say it out loud
Talk to an AI tutor that answers back, or join a live room with other learners and native speakers.
Practise what you read
Turn a grammar point or article into exercises, so it moves from recognised to usable.
Keep the words
Save new words to My Words and let spaced repetition bring them back before you forget them.
This directory began from a community-built list of free language resources — a year of collecting and checking by Joanna (u/chlebka) and dozens of contributors who suggested links, shared freely. See the original list. We have since expanded, re-checked and re-categorised it, and we keep the per-resource credits where the original list recorded them.