Best Spaced Repetition Apps for German, Compared

"Uses spaced repetition" is printed on almost every language app, and it means very different things. In some apps it is the whole product: every item has its own due date, months into the future. In others it is a review button that reshuffles last week's lesson. If you have decided that you want to learn German with spaced repetition, that difference matters more than the logo.

This guide compares the tools German learners actually ask about, on the points that decide whether you are still using one in month six: who makes the cards, how the scheduling works, whether German grammar is covered at all, and what it costs you in setup time.

What counts as real spaced repetition

Three tests separate a scheduler from a quiz with a marketing page.

• Every item has its own next date. Not "review unit 4", but "this word comes back in nine days, that one tomorrow".
• The gaps grow into months. A system that tops out at a week keeps you busy and lets everything fade by spring. German to B2 is thousands of items; they have to move out of your daily workload, or the workload buries you.
• A wrong answer costs something. The item has to come back sooner. If a miss changes nothing, the app is not measuring your memory.

Everything below is judged against those three. How the method itself works is in our guide to spaced repetition for German.

The comparison at a glance

Anki: the engine

Anki is the reference point. It is free on desktop and Android, open source, and since the FSRS scheduler became built in it predicts your forgetting about as well as anything available. You can put anything on a card: a word, a sentence with a gap, an audio clip, a picture.

What it does not bring is German. You either download a shared deck and inherit someone else's choices, or you build your own cards. A good German noun card needs the article, the plural, an example sentence and ideally audio. That is four pieces of work per card, and at 3,000 cards it is a second hobby. Anki rewards people who enjoy that hobby. We compared the two approaches in detail in Anki vs merke.me.

Choose it if you like configuring tools, already have material you want to memorise, or study several subjects at once.

merke.me: the course on a schedule

merke.me is our own product, so read this section with that in mind. It is built around one idea: the scheduling is real spaced repetition, and the German is already there.

• Content: the 10,000 most frequent German words in ten bands, the Goethe exam word lists, everyday spoken vocabulary, more than 1,000 collocations and expressions, and about 480 grammar points from A1 to C2. Every noun carries its article and plural, every entry has example sentences with translation, and every word and sentence has audio.
• Scheduling: eight fixed steps - 4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, 2 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 4 months. Pass the last one and the entry is mastered and leaves your queue. Miss one and it drops back one or two steps.
• Grammar as review items: a grammar point is taught with an explanation and at least 20 example sentences, then drilled as fill-in-the-gap reviews on the same schedule as your vocabulary.
• Answering: type the German, or reveal and rate yourself. You pick, and you can switch any time.

The fixed staircase is a decision, not a shortcut. It makes the workload predictable and gives every word a visible finish line, which an algorithm that adapts per card does not.

Choose it if you want to spend your study time studying German. You can start 100 words and 30 grammar points from any level for free, with no time limit - see pricing for the rest.

Memrise: a friendly start

Memrise today is a course app with short videos of native speakers and a conversation partner, not the community flashcard site it started as. The review feature brings words back, but the schedule is not the centre of the product and you cannot see or steer it much. For a first month of German it is pleasant and motivating. As a system for holding 5,000 words through B2, it is thin.

Choose it if you are at A1 and want to hear real people before you want a system.

Clozemaster: sentences in bulk

Clozemaster gives you thousands of German sentences with one word missing, ordered by word frequency, and schedules each sentence at growing intervals. It assumes you already know the basics; there are no lessons and no explanations. As a second tool next to a course it is strong, because it shows words in context at a volume no textbook reaches. The sentences come largely from open sentence collections, so quality varies, and you will sometimes guess the gap from the translation without knowing the word.

Choose it if you are around B1 and want a lot of reading-speed exposure with a schedule behind it.

Lingvist: fast and narrow

Lingvist teaches vocabulary in frequency order through typed gap sentences and adapts to what you already know, which makes it efficient for learners who are not starting from zero. It does one thing: words. Grammar appears as short hints. If vocabulary is your only gap, that focus is an advantage.

Choose it if you have an A2 base and want to add words quickly without building anything.

Quizlet: built for the test on Friday

Quizlet is the largest flashcard site in the world and most German school lists are on it somewhere. Its study modes are designed around learning a set until a date, which is exactly what a student before a vocabulary test needs. It is not designed to bring a word back four months later, and that is the review that makes a word permanent. More on that difference in Quizlet or Anki for German.

Choose it if you have a list and a deadline, not a multi-year plan.

What about Duolingo, Babbel and Busuu?

They are courses first. Each has a review feature, and each brings old material back, but none of them shows you a per-word schedule that stretches into months, and none lets a wrong answer reschedule a single word in a way you can see. They are compared in the best apps to learn German and in Duolingo alternatives for German. If spaced repetition is the reason you are reading this page, they are a supplement, not the system.

How to choose in two questions

Do you want to build your material or receive it? Building means Anki. Receiving means merke.me for a full course with grammar, Lingvist for vocabulary alone, Clozemaster for sentence volume.

Do you need grammar in the same queue? German grammar is a set of patterns you have to produce under pressure: the verb in second position, the dative after mit, the adjective ending after ein. Those can be scheduled exactly like words, and almost no vocabulary app does it. If you want one queue for both, your options are building cloze cards in Anki or using a course that treats grammar as review items. How that works is in spaced repetition for German grammar.

A sensible stack

Most learners who get to B2 with spaced repetition end up with two things, not five: one system that owns the daily reviews, and one source of real German next to it - a tutor, a series, a book. The mistake is running three review queues at once. Each one alone looks manageable; together they are ninety minutes a day, and the first one you skip collapses.

Pick one scheduler and give it three months. If you want to see what ours contains before deciding, the vocabulary, the grammar library and the collocations are open to read, and the decks show how they are ordered by level.