6 German Podcasts to Help You Study

Are you listening to German right now?

You could be.

Everyone has little moments of time throughout the day that they could be using to learn a foreign language, including German. It just so happens that German podcasts are this kind of micro-learning. Load them into your phone (even better, into LingQ) and carry on with whatever you’re doing 🙂

You can also learn German with songs, of course, but podcasts are sometimes a better choice because they present natural, conversational language instead of words sung to a beat.

In this post, we’ve got 6 great options for German podcasts you can enjoy at any level, on pretty much any subject!

Beginner German Podcasts

Deutsch – Warum Nicht?
We’ll start off with a classic, both in quality and in age. Warum Nicht has been a fun, engaging, and idiosyncratic introduction to the German language for nearly thirty years now. It’s an audio drama about a young student working in a hotel and his… Ex.

We say it like that because that’s one of the strangest and yet most intriguing things about the show. It’s easy to check out spoilers online, but in order to keep the magic, just dive right in without knowing too much. Soon it’ll become clear what’s going on, and you’ll be so focused on that that you won’t even notice your German improving!

Slow German with Annik Rubens
Annik Rubens is in charge of a long-running German podcast called Schlaflos in München, but it’s been discussed many times before. Fewer people, for some reason, have tried out her Slow German podcast.

It’s exactly what you’d think: a brief podcast spoken slowly and clearly. However, sometimes she chooses to discuss interesting or obscure words, and that bumps this podcast up to the intermediate category.

Intermediate German Podcasts

Freunde sein?
Perhaps you’ve seen this concept before: two people are sat down together and asked to have a chat. The questions are already pre-written, but the answers are spontaneous.

After enough questions and answers, it turns out that people open up faster than you’d think. In this program, fourteen questions in total (“Should we use Sie or Du?” “What’s something you like about your partner already?”) lead up to number 15, the name of the show: Freunde sein? (“Should we be friends?”).

Although the speed is a bit faster than the previous German podcasts we mentioned, the fact that the same questions are repeated every time make it perfect for people wanting to break into intermediate.

Anerzählt (formerly known as Nummerwelt)
Dirk Primbs leads a podcast with a very creative concept – the numbers around us. Each episode is only a few minutes long, but each one is related to a particular number. The box office haul of Wonder Woman, for instance, or the international phone code for Brunei.

What makes this podcast a little less difficult is you’re only listening to Dirk’s voice, so you don’t have to deal with different accents coming up.

Advanced German Podcasts

Die Frage
Each episode in this fantastic series is about a particular question – some light (fitness), some head scratching (identity changing), and some quite heavy (political extremism). A reporter has just a handful of weeks to build a story answering these questions, and the story is revealed through a conversation with the program host.

At its core, the podcast is about people and how they interact with each other. It’s extremely well-produced and thought-provoking, and before you know it you’ll be teaching your friends German just so you can talk about it with them.

Sag mal, du als Physiker
Science gets a bad rap for being “complicated.” And yet, when you look at the massive popularity of “pop science” blogs, commentators, and meme pages, you realize that it really can be pretty accessible.

Especially if Michael Büker is leading the discussion. He’s a physicist, an author, and a journalist, and he excels at making complex topics easy to understand – as long as your German is up to par!

Learn German Faster Using LingQ

These days, learning a new language is easier than ever…thanks to the internet.

Immersing yourself in German doesn’t require you to travel abroad or sign up for an expensive language program.

However, it can be a bit tiresome to find interesting content, go back and forth between sites, use different dictionaries to look up words, and so on.

That’s why there’s LingQ. A language app that helps you discover and learn from content you love.

You can import videos, podcasts, and much more and turn them into interactive lessons.

Keep all your favorite German content stored in one place, easily look up new words, save vocabulary, and review. Check out our guide to importing content into LingQ for more information.

LingQ is available for desktop as well as Android and iOS. Gain access to thousands of hours of audio and transcripts and begin your journey to fluency today.

Enjoyed this post? Check out polyglot and LingQ cofounder Steve Kaufmann’s blog post on the best way to learn German!

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Alex Thomas first visited Germany seven years ago and never got it out of his mind after that. He is a teacher and writer based in China.