Welcome to Grenzenlos Deutsch, an open online curriculum for beginning German!

This full-year curriculum is intended as a no-cost alternative to current, more traditional textbooks in the field. It mixes materials rooted in real-world, contemporary communication scenarios, multimedia content, and online learning activities.The Grenzenlos Deutsch curriculum ensures that the topics of discussion in the language classroom are relevant to and reflect today’s world.

We invite you to read the “For Instructors” and/or the “For Students” pages to get acquainted with the curriculum and how it is structured. You can check out our full overview of the entire curriculum as well. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we continue to improve and expand GD. Feel free to let us know if you have any comments or suggestions; we’ve been grateful for the helpful feedback we’ve received so far from our six pilot institutions.

This labor of love has been collaboratively designed, produced and edited with multiple teams of people working on all ends of the project. Please take a minute to look at our Credits and Acknowledgements page.

Note that you are welcome to view our collections of content developed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. These materials are thus available for you to reuse in your classrooms and projects. Here’s the link to our collection of photos and illustrations, and here’s a link to our Vimeo page with edited video interviews. Rather than captions, which can interfere with listening acquisition and assessment, complete transcripts of the video and audio files are available by request; we hope to provide a duplicate, captioned set of all our videos sometime in the future.

If you are interested in using this curriculum for your course, please feel free to contact Brigetta Abel (Macalester College) or Amy Young (Central College). We would be happy to share additional resources with you and to answer questions about Grenzenlos Deutsch.

Browser Recommendations: for the full experience of the integrated h5p activities, we recommend using Chrome. We have heard reports about issues with the Safari browser, so if you have technical difficulties with Safari, try switching browsers.