Useful online resources for German learners
Monday, 18th January 2010
There are many online resources available for German learners which can help you to practise and improve your German, or indeed to learn German on your own.
On the BBC website you can find German lessons, phrases, tips from other learners, guides to German grammar, TV and radio, and links to other resources. The lessons are suitable for learners at all levels from beginners to advanced, and there’s a German Gauge you can use to find your level.
Paul Joyce’s German pages provide some very good online resources for German learners, including lessons for beginners, verb tables, vocabulary lists, an extensive section on German dialects, and advice on writing letters in German.
Online German courses and lessons are offered on quite a few other websites, including Deutch-Lernen.com, Deutsche Welle, GermanPod101 and the Deutsche Akademie. Most such courses are free, though some charge for more detailed lessons and resources.
At Learning German Through Fairy Tales you can find a collection of stories in German with notes on vocabulary and grammar.
If you need to look up German words, or find the German equvialents of English words, online dictionaries are very handy. The most useful one is the LEO dictionary, which features bilingual dictionaries for German with English, French, Spanish, Italian and Chinese. The entries include related words and phrases, examples, recordings of pronunciation, and links to orthographically similar words. Other online German dictionaries include BEOLINGUS, Canoo, and Das Deutsches Wörterbuch (monolingual).
Most of the national and quite a few of the local German language newspapers can be found online. For example, from Germany there is Die Welt, Der Zeit, the Frankfurter Allgemeine and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. From Austria there is Der Standard, Die Presse and the Wiener Zeitung, and from Switzerland there is Der Bund and the NZZ.
German language radio is available via sites such as Deutsche Welle, MDR, NDR from Germany, ORF from Austria, DRS from Switzerland, and on international radio stations such as Radio France International, Radio Praha and Radio China International. Each station gives you a different perspective on the world through German, so listening to them can be very interesting, as well as helping you to improve your German.
The script and handwriting used in Old German documents and literature can be difficult to decipher, but help is available at Alte deutsche Schriften, a site which introduces the Sütterlinschrift, the style of handwriting taught in German schools between 1915 and 1940, and Frakturschrift, the main typeface used in German printing from the 16th century until 1940.
Tags: phrases, course, language, germany, german, learning, guide
Posted by Simon Ager 2010-01 under
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