Learning German can be such a pain. Conjugating your verbs, deciding whether something is accusative or dative and randomly seperating some words. Both a good teacher and some langauge exchange partners can do wonders however and you will speak German at a local brewery in no time. In oder to do that even faster, a little mobile help can do no harm. When you've had enough of your super-strict teacher and when you just can't produce any more German sentences, you might want to retreat a little and use a couple of apps to get the hang of it. There are fantastic apps out there designed to help you improve your German. Here is a list (definitely not exhaustive) to get you started.
The Classic One: Duolingo
Everyone knows someone who knows someone who used Duolingo to become fluent and actually succeeded. Whilst we don't believe that Duolingo can do quite that, we do appreciate its fun design and intuitive learning surface. It is motivating, entertaining and colourful - what more can you want? As long as you don't expect to actually be able to speak after a few weeks of using it, we fully recommend it. It sometimes lacks structure and at times teaches you very funny words, but it's a great method to keep learning and to learn words without really noticing.
The Fun One: Memrise
The interactive platform Memrise is a fun way to learn vocabulary. The app uses the widely-recognised spaced repitition system, which means that it will test you on vocabulary on a regular basis until you really know the word. As teachers, we strongly recommend this system to learn new words. As a rule of thumb, it is always better to learn vocab by yourself and have grammar explained to you by a teacher. The app is fairly intuitive and actually quite entertaining to use. You will want to see your plants grow and memorize those words. Don't expect anything fancy if you want to understand the language or get your grammar fix, but it'll do the job for lexis.
The Extensive One: Babbel
Although the app is not free beyond a trial period, we would still like to recommend Babbel and have it on our list. The app is particularly good if you are just starting out and want to get a first overview of the language (a bit of advice: you don't actually need a teacher for the first few sentences, you can really learn that yourself). Compared to similar platforms, Babbel really managed to explain grammar well and come up with realistic scenarios in their examples. We probably wouldn't rely on it to speak German fluently, but it will give you a fantastic head-start.
