How this board is kept

What this site is

A comparison of the ways into self-taught German, and a set of notes on the questions people actually ask about learning it. It is written for learners. It has nothing to say to teachers, schools or course creators, and it is not a language school.

It exists because German is badly served by the usual comparison format. The ordinary "best German app" article ranks products on features, and German's difficulty is not distributed the way the features are: it is cheap at the start and expensive in the middle, so a product can score well on everything and still be useless at the part that stops you.

The one editorial idea

Everything here is organised around a claim you can check for yourself: German hands an English speaker its spelling and its everyday vocabulary close to free, and charges later, all at once, for the article and case system, for word order, and for abstract vocabulary that stops resembling English.

If that is right, then the useful question is never "which German course is best" but "which part of German has stopped me, and what is any good at that part". Every page here is arranged to answer the second question.

Where the numbers come from

Every price on this site was read from the seller's own page, on this machine, on the date printed beside it. Nothing was taken from a review site, a directory or another blog.

Two consequences follow, and both are visible on the pages.

Currency is reported as served. Some sellers decided what currency to show us regardless of what we asked for: one served euros and one served Brazilian reais to a request that specified US English and US dollars. We print the currency we were actually shown and never convert, because a converted price is our arithmetic borrowing the seller's authority.

Blanks stay blank. Two sellers on the board gave us no usable figure and the exam bodies gave us nothing at all, so those three lines say so rather than carrying a number borrowed from somewhere else.

What this site will not publish

No timeline to fluency, to a level, or to a "conversational" standard. The only respected published figure — the US Foreign Service Institute's — describes full-time government students reaching a defined score on a government scale, and it is quoted here as that and never multiplied out into anybody's evenings.

No pass rates, salary figures or job-prospect claims, because the ones in circulation are mostly uncited.

No score out of ten for any product. We have run no controlled trial of a German course, and a rating with no trial behind it is decoration that looks like evidence. That is also why there is no rating box anywhere on this site.

No commission rate, cookie window or affiliate network for anything named here. Four of the seven products we are permitted to link are marked unverified in the fleet's own partner research, and the directories behind them contradict each other.

No coupon or promo-code pages, which go stale within weeks and which some programmes actively penalise the buyer for using.

The three doors that were shut

On 24 September 2026 we went to read the organisations that would actually know about German certification, and could not.

The Goethe-Institut returned a flat refusal to every request, including to its own front page. The Council of Europe, which owns the A1 to C2 framework, returned a security block instead of its level descriptions. A German publisher's catalogue returned its navigation menus and no product information at all.

So this site publishes no exam fee, no exam format, no eligibility rule, no official level descriptor and no book price. Those things are all easy to find elsewhere and we are not going to copy them, because a figure we have not read is a figure we cannot date — and once a site starts mixing the two, a reader has no way of telling which is which. The levels page explains the gap in full.

Money

There are commercial links on this site and they are labelled wherever they appear. No programme has approved this domain yet, so at the time of writing every one of those links goes to a seller's ordinary front page and earns nothing.

The strongest recommendation on the site — a public broadcaster's free German course — pays nothing and never will. Duolingo, which is also recommended where it is the honest answer, runs no affiliate programme at all and is deliberately not routed through any commercial link here. The disclosure sets out the whole arrangement, including what we would have to change before a recommendation could change.

Corrections

If a price here is out of date, a figure is wrong, or a claim is attributed to the wrong source, we would rather hear it than not. Say so, and if you are right the page changes and the date on it changes too.