What are the 1000 most frequently used nouns in German?

It depends on what you need them for.

If you're a psychologist, you might be interested in a so-called corpus (a very large set of text) sourced from the prattlings-on of toddlers and school kids of various ages to determine changing interests and developmental phases. A marketer might use the same corpus to find out what toys or tv shows are going viral on the schoolyard, and a linguist might use it to study the rate of use of multisyllabic words over time. Or something. But that's not what I, a German teacher, need them for.

It goes on, somewhat bizarrely, that you can pick a specific culture or accent that you’re “looking for”. Among the choices (for German, mind you) are India, Poland, and Ukraine, along with the more obvious Germany and Austria (but, weirdly, not Switzerland – perhaps there’s more demand for German with an Indian accent than Swiss German)… all kidding aside, Preply knows its target market, with an influx of people from India and Ukraine being a huge part of the current German learner population.

You move on past the type of German you want (certificate, conversation, very deeply on this list also Swiss German, etc.) and then on to give information about your availability and your budget, starting at (what?) 1€ per lesson and going up to 35€+ per lesson (35€, by the way, would also be considered too low by the most vocal users of popular message boards for “real” German teachers).

Is Preply Free?

So, we’ve gone into this already a bit in the previous paragraphs. The answer is: No! No part of it is free, refunds notwithstanding. You can get a trial lesson with a teacher at their regular rate (apparently the trial can also be 20 minutes, at a fraction of their full lesson price). You can select tutors based on what they charge, so in a way it’s a bit of a “pay what you want” kind of situation, as long as what you want to pay (when learning German) is at least 12€ per 50-minute lesson. I won’t stand here and say that people charging 12 Euros for 50 minutes are bad teachers or bad people, but they certainly are contributing to the profession being undervalued and professional teachers getting less than they deserve. Personally I’d like it more if Preply itself would set the bar somewhere and instate a mandatory minimum of what people can charge.

What do users think? Is Preply Good? Reddit Comments.

In this section I endeavor to summarize my impression of what people on Reddit are saying about their experience with Preply. In my opinion, Reddit is as good a forum as any to get some interesting legitimate insights and see some interesting discussions on a product or service. Much more than reviews on the app stores or Google, because who knows if the person writing them is real, has some type of agenda, has been prompted to write their review too early on (a big Udemy problem!), what the algorithm is that is showing you that particular review in the first place, and if the person writing it is similar to you at all (could be an edgy 12 year old writing). Obviously Reddit has these problems, too, but when you check a user’s post history you can get an idea of what they’re like, what their agenda is, and if they can be trusted to be real. This is especially true for reviews before 2022 and generative AI bots became sophisticated.

That being said: HOLY MOLY are there a lot of single-comment accounts writing mostly negative things about Preply on Reddit. Clearly someone has an agenda. In this review, we will ignore those single-comment throwaway accounts completely. I don’t trust them (why would someone need a throwaway account to post an impression of a language platform?). To be fair, some of the positive ones are also single-comment accounts – I will ignore those, too, and that way we’ll stay above what might just be a bot-battle between two or more language learning platforms. Might be.

Anyway. So, ensuring that the people writing are real enough, in summary I can say that many tutors who posted are unhappy with the amount of commission that Preply takes, as well as the unpaid trial lesson (which some students simply don’t show up for). This makes sense, but in my opinion is in the nature of the beast. It might seem cruel to teachers who do the trial lesson (that Preply is receiving money for) and don’t get paid for it, but in my opinion it’s an important tool to prevent just anyone from joining as a teacher and then just making money off of trial lessons that never lead to a subscription by the student.

By the way, you can tell that Preply is under attack from fake accounts because a lot of the “dissatisfied student” comments in this thread seem to be unaware that they’re on a subreddit for English teachers – indicating that they made an account and headed straight for the most recent discussion of Preply in order to share their (likely fake) bad feedback.

From a students’ perspective, the reviews are mixed, which is also to be expected, given the huge range of tutors available. Several commenters were writing along the lines that they were unhappy that if you stop at any point, Preply will remove the hours you have left in your account, or that it’s really a subscription model where you buy lesson credits each month but that they are forfeited if unused. I would also be unhappy about this – but I can see the advantage of putting pressure on students to not take long breaks between lessons and to try to learn the language regularly (the less intensively you work with the language, the less progress you make – and the more likely you are to even regress and become demotivated).

There are also many positive reviews, of people who’ve really hit it off with their teachers and can get past the billing model. I will point out that in my research of the most recent (as of April 2024) threads about Preply, almost no commenters are saying negative things about their teachers’ personality and teaching styles. However, complaint that does come up is that teachers are prone to cancelling, which, given the billing model, I understand would create a special issue on this platform. The alternative platform that people are suggesting doesn’t have some of these issues is Italki.

Please take these with a grain of salt. It’s just a general impression of some pros and cons from some vocal users (and perhaps people/bots with an agenda), but to me these comments make sense.