by Jakob Straub
Updated on January 8, 2024
The top 7 tools for a German grammar check online
German Grammar is notoriously difficult. Language learners of all levels rely on a grammar check to improve their writing. A language tool can help you by flagging and correcting issues and mistakes when you’re writing.
To know if your grammar is correct, don’t rely on manually looking up issues. We’ll show you how to do a German grammar check online and introduce you to the best tools available!
Whether you’re writing an important email, a business report or your own fiction, the grammar struggle is real. A language tool can provide relief by taking your mind off cases, articles, pronouns and other grammatical complications. Grammarly is a popular grammar checker for English, but it doesn’t support the German language yet.
But if you want to know, “How can I check my German grammar?”—you’ve come to the right place! We’ve found the best Grammarly alternatives for a German grammar check that allow you to focus on the content of your writing and improve German language skills.
LanguageTool is a multilanguage check for grammar, but also style and spelling which you can use for free. It supports not only German, but over 25 languages in total. You can perform a German grammar check online by simply pasting your text into the field on the website. You can also install a free browser extension to check your writing directly as you compose emails or fill out forms.
The free version of LanguageTool allows for a German grammar check of up to 10,000 characters per text. For less than €5 per month, the premium version supports texts with up to 60,000 characters and enhanced checks as well as style and tone suggestions and add-ons for Office or Google Docs.
Duden is the name of a German dictionary publisher. With Duden Mentor, they offer a German grammar check online. You can copy your text into a field on their website or install a browser plugin. You’ll receive highlights of issues with grammar and spelling, then you can choose to accept the corrections. On the downside, the explanations for the mistakes are available in German only.
Duden Mentor is free to use up to 800 characters, or up to 1,500 characters with a free account. For a monthly premium of €10 or €15, you get a limit of 20k or 40k, a larger personal dictionary as well as style and synonym features.
GermanCorrector.com is a free German grammar check tool with unobtrusive ads. It uses the software of LanguageTool, Hunspell and Diction to highlight spelling mistakes and basic grammar and style issues.
It works well for brief texts which you simply copy and paste into the form. You can set German Corrector to autocorrect or to mark up any issues. In that case, you can often choose between options. German Corrector has a setting for German, Swiss or Austrian variants of the language.
Online-Spellcheck has a misleading name because it’s also a tool to perform a German grammar check. It supports around 20 different languages and is free to use thanks to advertising on the website. Online-Spellcheck compares your text to a dictionary, applies grammar rules and uses a statistical analysis based on a large text body to find mistakes. You can copy and paste text into the online form, provide a URL with online text, upload a Word, PDF, text or image file or link to a document in cloud storage for checking.
Rechtschreibprüfung24 is actually an affiliate of LanguageTool and offers a very similar spell and grammar checking and text analysis package. You can paste your text into an online form, upload a document or use the LanguageTool browser or Word plugin. Guests and users after free registration can analyse and check up to 20,000 characters. Premium users pay €5 per month for up to 40,000 characters, an ad-free experience and additional plugins.
Korrekturen is a great resource for a quick German grammar check of a single issue. Let’s say you are composing an email or are writing a document and stumble across a particular problem in German, be that spelling, grammar or hyphenation. A quick search on the website will reveal the correct answer.
Common mistakes have their own category where you can see the contrast between the correct and incorrect version with an explanation. For the analysis and improvement of important texts, you can contract their professional proofreading services. You can also use Korrekturen to look up inflection, synonyms, opposites, rules of the German language as well as the specific usage of Austrian, Swiss, Latin and English words in German. By the way, did you know the major differences between English and German grammar?
Reverso is a free online language tool for spell and grammar checks, translation, dictionary lookups and verb conjugation. It uses Artificial Intelligence and Neural Machine Translation. You can also listen to the pronunciation by native speakers. Reverso has a straightforward web interface. Unfortunately, the grammar check is not yet available in German, but you can use the conjugation, dictionary, translation, spelling and speaking features.
Now what is the best German grammar checker? The answer depends on your needs and where you most often encounter issues that require a grammar check in German, for example, with the usage and conjugation of modal verbs. Be aware that no German language grammar checker can spot all mistakes all the time.
If you want to learn correct usage and improve your German language skills in the long term, you’ll need to study the suggestions of the tool and apply them in your writing. For this approach, a grammar check in German with lengthy explanations might be best, such as Duden Mentor or Korrekturen.
Should the copy and paste to check German grammar and spelling online be too much back and forth for you, consider one of the browser plugin options such as LanguageTool, Duden Mentor or Rechtschreibprüfung24. These allow you to perform a check as you compose. For an occasional quick check, the free options are sufficient.
These German grammar check tools are the best we could find and top Grammarly alternatives to use with the German language. As you can see, the more capable solutions come with premium features for longer texts, but you can learn plenty from the free resources as well.
Of course, keep reading the Lingoda blog and you’ll learn about the finer issues of the German language and its grammar—and why life isn’t too short to learn German! What is your favourite way of checking your German grammar? Let us know and don’t forget to book a class!
