Free German learning resources
2 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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Interactive platform for learning German vocabulary.
Vocabulary and grammar exercises, idioms, false friends and more.
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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.
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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.