Bryn Savage

High-quality video has been shown to be a valuable source of authentic language input for children learning a minority language (study link). There are many ways to bring video in to support your family’s learning objectives for your child. Variety in video (as in other media) is extremely useful. We want to give kids access to content below, at and above their level. Content they have already seen and mastered is comforting and builds linguistic confidence, content at their level lets them master new things, and content above their level helps them stretch. Especially for households like mine that don’t have multiple German speakers, authentic sources are an important supplement.

When my son was 15-20 months or so, while we were otherwise screen-free, I used to put on “slice of life” German shows that showed interesting happenings around the farm. I would chat with him about what we saw while he played with his own toys. The shows were not exciting enough to take all his attention, however he got exposure to different dialects and people talking as they normally would, not specifically for little kids. 

Public broadcasting stations in Germany make a huge amount of high quality content available worldwide for free and ad-free. The broadcasters have their own dedicated apps and websites that you can use, and upload much of it to YouTube as well. If you are a confident German speaker, starting with the public broadcasters’s sites will allow you to eliminate advertising. If you aren’t comfortable navigating the broadcasters’ sites in German, there is also a huge amount of content from them available on YouTube (more below). 

German public broadcasters’ sites/apps: KiKa is a dedicated site for kids’ content from ARD and ZDF (browser link). It is available both via browser or as phone apps. ZDF and ARD also have independent sites where you can find their full offerings, both for adults and kids (ZDF main site, ZDF kids’ content, ARD main site, ARD documentaries, ARD kids’ content). Both are worth a stop if you are looking for content for yourself, too. Note: While most content on the dedicated apps/websites can be played in the US, there is no site-wide filter for regional availability, so you may only determine it can’t be played in the US when you click to play the video. This can be overcome with VPN or avoided by watching via the broadcasters’ YouTube channels, where you will only see content you can access.

Netflix: The US Netflix site has limited German content, but you can change languages to watch many familiar kids shows in German. There is, however, a lot of great content on German Netflix, which you can access with VPN.

YouTube has the lowest barrier to entry for free German content. To reduce ads or the algorithm moving you to other content, you can turn off autoplay and restrict viewing to reputable channels from the German public broadcasters.