Hi guys,
when learning a language, getting a lot of input in that language is important. The more you get the better - but it's often not easy to find good sources. I got this for you. The following sources are not aimed at language learners but at native speakers. So if you just started learning German, they will be extremely difficult to understand. There's also another website that I want to share with you, that can help you to use these sources better for your endeavour of learning German - it can also be used for other languages.
One little disclaimer first: The mainstream of German news is quite liberal. If you want something on the spectrum of... let's say Fox News... this will be a rare find in Germany and it will only have a small audience.
Let's start with news sites and TV stations:
Tagesschau.de and ARD
Tagesschau is the German news. It's the thing your parents always watched in the evening when you were a child. They are known for their high quality and objectivity. This site is pretty much part of my daily routine and I can strongly recommend it.
Tagesschau itself is not a broadcaster. It's the news show of the "first German televion" ARD - German public tv station number one.
One big bonus: Many of their news articles have an mp3 version. So along with the text you get the read version of it.
It's not a private news broadcaster but governmentally funded (if you're living in Germany you'll have to pay for all the publicly funded news stations on a regular basis). They are no governmental puppets though but quite impartial.
Here you can find an overview of their most important articles they published during the last 7 days.
On their media center you can find lots of series, shows, movies and documentaries. It's all free.
I prefer to sort it by alphabet on "Sendungen a-z" to find what I'm looking for. One show I particularly like is "W wie wissen". It's an educational show that covers all kinds of topics. Every show covers one bigger issue and will then look at it from several angles.
Tagesschau also has an app.
ZDF
ARD is the first German public tv station, ZDF is the second. Not much more to say - their media center is integrated into their main website.
Arte
Arte is a smaller publicly funded tv station and a German/French cooperation. They do have excellent documentaries but they also have more artsy stuff that's just plain weird, such as this.
Let's go to the private newspapers:
die Welt
FAZ - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
die Zeit
Spiegel Online
Especially the first three are probably the most prestigeous German newspapers. If you want something more leaning into economics, then Handelsblatt might be for you.
Projekt Gutenberg
This project provides a lot of literature of which the copyright has expired. Most of it is free and there is also a wide range of German classics among them - but also many books in other languages.
LingQ
This website is a nice little tool for learning languages. It's hard to use if you're learning a language from scratch, but once you're a bit more familiar, it can prove really useful.
It pretty much works like this: You choose one of the existing texts or import your own (such as a news article - adding mp3 files is also possible). On lingQ you can then read the text and can add translations to words or phrases. LingQ will recommend translations based on their integrated dictionary or the translations that have already been used by its user base. A word/phrase with your personal translation becomes a "lingq". Every lingq is marked in the text and has a level ranging from 1-4, depending on how well you know it. You can let lingq send you a daily list with "words of the day", consisting of your lingqs for review. This way you only get to review words that you actually need in the texts you read.
If you've learned the word and are familiar with it, you can mark it as known. It then won't be highlighted anymore and will not be sent to you in your "words of the day"-list.
The website learns along with you and it remembers words for the texts to come. So for every new text it can tell you how many words you already know - and how many you don't. This can help you assess if a text might be manageable or maybe a bit too difficult for you at your current state.
This website is not entirely free though. The amount of lingqs is limited in the free version. Words you learned are not counted as lingqs though, so if you run out of free lingqs, you can simply learn the ones you already saved, to make space for new ones.
Wonderful!
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