Best Apps to Learn German in 2026

Bubblegum suits learners who want German built around their own lives. Tell Poppy, your AI tutor, what you want to learn. She writes lessons for your level and helps you understand the words and grammar. You can read and listen, and ask her about anything that is unclear. News and stories give you more German to read about music, food, family, and other things you care about.

The trade-off is that Bubblegum does not replace real German voices. For recorded speakers, Pimsleur and Mango are the better fit. For a fixed course, try Duolingo or Busuu, and for conversation, try the apps in Learn With People.

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Duolingo shows your progress as a Duolingo Score. A score of 60 to 79 is early B1, where Duolingo says you can handle common situations while traveling.

Busuu teaches reading, writing, speaking, and listening, with grammar lessons, vocabulary lessons, and cultural insights. Its course follows the CEFR, the A1 to C2 scale that Goethe-Institut exams use.

Memrise has an official German course built around scenarios such as travel, work, food, and health. You pick the situations you want to prepare for, then learn the words and hear them from native speakers.

Mango Languages teaches German through conversations spoken by native speakers. A voice comparison tool lets you check your accent against their audio. Many public libraries give free access with a library card, so check yours first.

Babbel guides you through listening, speaking, and writing. Its lessons use conversations you might have at work, while traveling, or with friends.

Pimsleur suits learners who want to start speaking before they read much. You listen, answer out loud, and then hear the right answer. Levels 1 to 3 each include six bonus packs that add vocabulary.

Drops teaches German words in short, playful lessons with pictures. Its lessons are meant to fit into about five minutes.

Clozemaster is a game where you read a German sentence with a missing word and fill it in from the context. Sentences are ordered by how common the missing word is, so you meet the most useful words first. You can also hear a sentence before you see it.

AnkiWeb has German decks made by other learners. They include a Langenscheidt basic vocabulary deck for A1 to B2, a deck of the 4,000 most common German words, and Goethe-Institut word lists for A1 and A2.

LingQ is made for learners who read and listen to real German. Its German library has courses such as Leicht Deutsch Lernen and the German LingQ Podcast, and its reader marks the words you know and the words you are learning.

Language Reactor is a browser extension that adds learning tools to Netflix and YouTube. It also has a page of German YouTube videos to start with.

italki has German tutors for beginners through advanced learners. You can book private lessons or group classes.

Preply has a page of German tutors for live one-on-one lessons. Preply says its tutors understand what adult English speakers find hard in German, such as word order, cases, and formal and informal address.

HelloTalk is a language exchange app with pages of German language partners, including people in Germany. You chat by text and voice messages and correct each other's writing.

Tandem is a language exchange app where people teach each other their native languages. It has German pages for cities such as Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, and Frankfurt. Tandem DeutschConnect is an EU-funded project that offers free German practice, through exchanges and language parties, to people from outside the EU who are new to Germany.