Learn German
Read the language that never said no to another clause.
Deutsch · 95 million speakers · Lemmatizer: spaCy
German is the most widely spoken native language in Europe and sits on one of the largest book markets in the world, so the supply problem that limits most languages on this site simply doesn't exist here. What does exist is a morphology problem: four cases, three genders, and nouns assembled out of other nouns on the spot. That is the part a plain dictionary can't help with, and the part Laesi is for.
What the big apps miss
No shortage of anything
Germany, Austria, and Switzerland publish more than almost anyone, and the back catalogue is out of copyright and free. The question for German is never what to read, it's what to read first.
Handles German's built-to-order compounds
German assembles a noun whenever it needs one, Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung. Laesi lemmatizes a compound like any other word, and the translation is usually all you need. By the time these turn up regularly, you can read the seams yourself.
Four cases, tracked properly
Der, den, dem, des are one word wearing four endings. spaCy resolves each form to its lemma while Laesi keeps every form you meet tracked separately, so you can see which ones you actually recognise.
Die Verwandlung, opening
Franz Kafka, 1915
Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.
Er lag auf seinem panzerartig harten Rücken und sah, wenn er den Kopf ein wenig hob, seinen gewölbten, braunen, von bogenförmigen Versteifungen geteilten Bauch.
What to read in German
German is the most widely spoken native language in Europe and sits on one of the largest book markets in the world, so the supply problem that limits most languages on this site does not exist here. What does exist is a morphology problem. German assembles nouns out of other nouns on the spot, splits its verbs in half and posts the halves to opposite ends of the sentence, and expects you to keep track. That is the part a dictionary cannot help you with, and the part Laesi was built for.
A girl who can listen defeats the grey men stealing everyone's time. Written for children and read mostly by adults, in plain declarative German that never talks down. The obvious first German novel.
A bookbinder reads characters out of their books and into the world, and loses his wife into the story in the exchange. The German Harry Potter, more or less, and on the same scale. Long, clear, unhurried German.
Two hundred tales of a few pages each, and you already know the plots, so you can check yourself against a story you have known since childhood. On the UNESCO Memory of the World register.
Look up the content warnings first
Two fourteen-year-olds steal a Lada and drive east with no map. Written almost entirely in a teenager's spoken register, which means short sentences and the vocabulary Germans actually use. Taught in German schools.
The Känguru books are stand-up routines in chapter form: a communist kangaroo moves in with the narrator and the two argue about capitalism. Kling reads his own audiobooks, so text and audio run together.
A burnt-out lawyer is sent to a mindfulness therapist by his wife and starts applying the exercises to the problem of his mafia client. The mindfulness is played straight and Björn is simply using it wrong.
It is 1642 and the Thirty Years' War has run for twenty-four years, because demons are paid in corpses and have no reason to let it end. Walters is a language nerd and it shows in the Latin, Swedish and Dutch the characters use.
A novel about a city built on books, by an author who cannot leave a word alone. Every second name is an anagram of a real writer and the invented vocabulary runs to hundreds of items.
An archaeological dig turns up a two-thousand-year-old grave containing a camera manual. Plot-driven, propulsive, and written in clean contemporary prose.
Opens in 1929 and walks forward year by year into the Nazi period. Gereon is stubborn to the point of exasperation, but Charlotte more than evens him out.
One man's life in an Alpine valley across the twentieth century, told in about a hundred and fifty quiet pages. Shortlisted for the Man Booker International.
Josef K. is arrested and never told why. Short, with long sentences but plain vocabulary. Read Mann and Goethe later, or never.
Look German up properly
Wiktionary and Google Translate are built in. Bring in the references serious German learners actually use.
Recommended dictionaries
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Wiktionary Built in
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Google Translate Built in
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DWDS ↗ Monolingual
Definitions alongside corpus evidence, frequency curves and real sentences from a century of print.
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Duden ↗ Monolingual
The authority, and what German speakers reach for when an argument needs settling.
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dict.cc ↗ Translation
Community-built and enormous. Strongest on idioms, compounds and regionalisms.
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Linguee ↗ Translation
Shows a word inside real translated sentence pairs rather than in isolation.
Get German to read & listen to
Ebook stores, audiobook subscriptions, news, and learner material: bring any of it into Laesi.
Sells nothing but DRM-free EPUB. Some titles carry an invisible watermark, which does not restrict anything. Re-downloadable indefinitely, no account required at the reader end. Start here.
A small German publisher selling exclusively DRM-free, with a deep backlist of classics in properly typeset editions rather than dumped scans.
The largest German-language bookshop, and the answer to "where do I buy the new thing". Filter on "Ohne Kopierschutz" or "Digitales Wasserzeichen" and you get a usable EPUB; "Adobe DRM" means you do not. That distinction is the whole game in German ebook buying, and the labels are on the product page.
Free EPUBs of out-of-copyright German, proofread rather than raw OCR. Everything before roughly 1930 is here, including all of Grimm.
The German catalogue is genuinely deep, which is not true of most languages on this site. Bought individually or through a credit plan.
Audiobooks and ebooks by subscription. Nothing is sold individually.
The same shape as Storytel, with a different catalogue.
Germany's public broadcaster, the German NPR & PBS. Most of it carries German subtitles.
Deutschlandfunk's news in easy German. Short sentences, common words, and a glossary for anything unavoidable. The German 8 Sidor.
Deutsche Welle reads the day's news slowly, with the full transcript published alongside. Ordinary vocabulary at an unhurried pace, which is a different exercise from simplified vocabulary at normal pace.
The country's best-known news magazine. Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit are the other two national titles.
A structured course from A1 upward with answer keys, which makes it workable alone rather than only in a classroom.
Curated by the Laesi team · last reviewed 2026-07-30
Watch and listen in German
Five or six minutes of stop-motion before bed, on air since 22 November 1959. Germany had two Sandmännchen during the division, and the East got theirs on screen days ahead of the West; after reunification it was the Eastern one that survived. This is that one. The puppet goes back to Ole Lukøje, Hans Christian Andersen's sleep-bringer.
An East German soldier is pushed across the border as a spy and then keeps turning up at every hinge of the late Cold War, through 86 and 89 in the sequels. Scripted, clearly spoken, and the period setting means nobody talks at contemporary speed.
A Stasi assassin comes out of prison after the Wall falls and starts settling accounts. A Netflix production, broader and stranger than Deutschland 83, and the obvious thing to watch next.
Small-town time travel, four interlocking generations, and a plot that genuinely requires attention. Netflix's own, and the dialogue is quiet and often muttered, so turn the German subtitles on and expect to need them.
Look up the content warnings first
The Kutscher adaptation, but a soft recommendation only. It is handsome, but it departs from the books far enough that the two are better treated as separate works. Read first, watch second.
A Sunday night crime slot running since 1970, with rotating teams in every major German-speaking city. More than a thousand episodes, each self-contained, and the regional casting makes it the easiest way to hear how differently the language is spoken across the country.
A Stasi officer assigned to bug a playwright's flat listens for long enough to change his mind. Ulrich Mühe, who had been under surveillance himself, gives one of the great restrained performances. Slow, deliberate speech throughout.
Two German Turks marry to escape their families and it goes as badly as that suggests. Fast, overlapping, code-switching dialogue, so this is a later watch. Soul Kitchen is the gentler Akin, and much easier to watch.
Look up the content warnings first
A U-boat crew in a steel tube for three hours. Shouted, technical, and acoustically hostile, which makes it terrible practice and essential viewing. The 1981 television cut is the one to find.
Look up the content warnings first
Weimar science fiction, and a curiosity for a learner: it is silent, so the German arrives as intertitles you can pause and read at your own pace. Nosferatu works the same way. Reading practice disguised as film history.
Unscripted street interviews with German and English subtitles running together. Real speed, real filler words, real hesitation, which is the thing textbooks cannot give you. Free, and the transcripts are web pages, so the extension can read them.
Two hosts take turns telling each other a historical story the other has not heard. Conversational rather than scripted, roughly an hour, with show notes and sources published for every episode.
Features, for German specifically
German is one of the best-served languages in Laesi. Here's what makes a difference when you're reading it.
See everything Laesi does →-
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spaCy de_core_newsFull morphological analysis across case, gender, number, and the strong-verb ablaut. The same model backs Swiss German and Bavarian, which is why those two are supported at all.
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Capitalization is not a hintEvery German noun is capitalized, so sentence-initial capitals tell you nothing. Laesi lemmatizes on the analyzer's reading rather than on the shape of the word.
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Separable verbs, in practiceEr ruft seinen Bruder an puts half of anrufen at the end of the clause. Shift-click saves the pair as one multi-word lemma with its own knowledge level today; reuniting them automatically is on the roadmap.
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Import from anywhereProject Gutenberg's German shelf, Tolino and Thalia EPUBs, DW's slow-news audio transcripts, ARD and ZDF subtitles. Drop any of it in.
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