Deutsch-Atlas
A free, local-first app by Vitaly Vorobyev for learning German — a structured textbook, interactive
exercises, and spaced-repetition flashcards in one place. It runs in your browser
or as a desktop app and keeps everything on your device. Explanations are
bilingual: every topic is written twice, in English and in Russian (Ukrainian
too, and German itself from B1 on), and you switch between them at any time.
The German examples, tables and readings are always visible.
The Heute (Today) screen is the front door: one button starts a ~15-minute
guided session, while the app keeps track of what's due for review, what you've
mastered, and the next topic to learn.
Why it's different. No ads, no accounts, no gamification. The design
follows what learning research actually supports — active recall, typed
answers, spaced review, interleaved practice, and an explanation the moment
you get something wrong. And automatically scored answers are kept visibly
apart from your own writing and speaking: the app never dresses up practice as
a verified result.
What's inside
- A fully authored A1 and A2 course, and every B1 unit written — twelve A1 and twenty-five A2
units, each with a diagnostic pretest, a full article, a graded reading,
exercises, and its own vocabulary; twenty B1 units are live — the fourteen of
the frozen contract plus six that close the DTZ Themen and Sprachhandlungen denominators — with an
end-of-level checkpoint and an entry placement test. Every headword of the
Goethe-Institut's A1, A2 and B1 Wortlisten is covered, and the Über page reports
how far each level goes with figures measured from the content itself, not
hand-written.
- Interactive exercises with instant feedback — multiple choice, gap-fill,
matching, word order, tables, translation, open writing, speaking, and
listening or reading comprehension. Get one wrong and a short explanation of
the rule appears at once, in English or Russian.
- Flashcards with real recall — vocabulary becomes flashcards both ways,
scheduled by FSRS (modern spaced repetition). In the production direction you
type the German — article included — instead of just flipping the card, and
every word comes with pronunciation (IPA) and audio.
- Reading you work through, and reading you just read — every topic has a
short glossed text with comprehension questions, and alongside them a longer,
easier story to read straight through for meaning, the kind of reading that
builds fluency rather than testing it.
- A ~15-minute guided daily session — any due retention checks first, then
due flashcards, a short mixed-exercise workout, and a suggestion for what to
read next.
- Delayed checks that ask what actually stuck — two, seven and twenty-one
days after you learn something, the app asks again in a fresh variant, so the
answer has to come from the rule rather than from remembering the question.
- Weak-spot training and an honest progress dashboard — exercises from
different topics are interleaved, prioritizing what you recently got wrong and
the specific confusions your history shows (dative pronouns, haben/sein, word
order …). Fortschritt shows an activity heatmap, streak, per-topic completion,
and trends for each of those confusions.
Getting it
Use it in the browser — the site is deployed at
https://deutsch.vitavision.dev/. Nothing to install; progress stays in your
browser.
Signing in is optional. Without an account the app is complete and entirely
local — an account only adds a copy of your progress in the cloud so a second
device can pick it up. New accounts are approved by hand, so if you sign in and
are told your account is waiting, keep going: everything is saved on your device
and uploads once it is approved. Connecting the desktop app, and the rest of
account handling, is in the accounts guide.
Or install it on your phone — it is a Progressive Web App, so the same URL
installs to the home screen on iOS (Safari → Share → Zum Home-Bildschirm) and
Android (Chrome → App installieren), with no app store involved. It then runs
in its own window and keeps working offline: visited pages, the recordings you
have played and all of your progress stay on the device.
Installation instructions and a QR code.
On iOS, installing also stops the system evicting your saved progress after a
week of not opening it.
Or install the desktop app (Windows, Linux, macOS) from
GitHub Releases:
- Windows:
.exe (NSIS) or .msi. SmartScreen may warn — choose
More info → Run anyway.
- Linux:
.deb (sudo apt install ./deutsch-atlas_…_amd64.deb) or
.AppImage (chmod +x, then run). Text-to-speech needs speech-dispatcher
with a German voice; without one, audio-comprehension tasks fall back visibly
to reading comprehension.
- macOS:
.dmg, unsigned — after moving the app to Applications run
xattr -cr /Applications/Deutsch-Atlas.app, or right-click → Open
(macOS 15+: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway).
Or run it locally with Bun:
bun install
bun run dev # http://localhost:4321
Your data
Everything stays with you. On first open the app asks for a name and creates a
local profile — no account, no server, no tracking. Several people can share
one device, each with fully separate progress. Exercise attempts and flashcard
scheduling are stored in your browser (or in the desktop app's own storage) and
recorded automatically as you practice.
The Fortschritt (progress) page can export your progress as a JSON snapshot and
import it elsewhere — for example to move from the website to the desktop app.
Import merges by default, so nothing is overwritten without asking.
Development
Changing the app or writing content starts at CLAUDE.md; docs/README.md
maps every developer document. Two more applications live in this repository, each with a user
guide in docs/apps/: Redaktion, the editorial workbench, and
Tonwerk, the studio where the listening audio is made and approved.
Deutsch-Atlas is AI-assisted, human-directed and edited. AI systems support drafting and asset
generation; they are not credited as authors. The project’s ownership, licence boundaries and
authorship-provenance process are summarized in NOTICE.md and
docs/authoring/product-protection.md.
Licence
The application code is MIT — see LICENSE. The course-specific
src/assets/illustrations/ and src/components/visuals/ directories are explicitly excluded
from that grant; they are not dual-licensed. The course material in content/ — articles,
exercises, readings and vocabulary — together with those illustrations and the instructional
documents listed in content/LICENSE, is Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0:
use and adapt it freely, with credit, under the same licence.
