I am new in German, and I need to learn lots of words. The easiest way is to learn a word in a sentence.

I am looking for an online service, which provides a simple sentence for a given word.

For instance, I give it, Überhaupt, and it gives me:

Sie war überhaupt nicht krank.

I have reviewed a few dictionaries such as this one, but they did not provide such service.


Dictionaries often provide example sentences for a given word. amongst these my favourite tool is the

Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache

which is maintained and provided for free from the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Amongst many tremendously helpful tools they provide a well maintained body of texts from contemporary or classical literature, and from renown newspapers, searchable for any given word.

See for example the text body for überhaupt.

If that was not satisfying I often use a search engine to scrape texts from online newspapers for a given word. By restricting searches to a reliably source of well edited papers we get quite useful examples:

Die Zeit: überhaupt
Der Spiegel: überhaupt
FAZ: überhaupt


Tatoeba is a portal that collects example sentences and the corresponding translations. You can search for words or sentence fragments, and you can define which languages you're interested in. For example, the following link


searches for example sentences containing "überhaupt" in German with translations into English.

The example sentences and the translations are provided by Tatoeba's users, so you should take them with a grain of salt. But I've found the portal helpful to get example sentences while studying French and Japanese vocabulary.


Although your concept of learning words in context (here: in sentences) is already good, my suggestion would be to not use a ready-made source of phrases but try to find such phrases in texts you read (and find interesting / pleasant / intriguing), note them down and memorize them (e.g. on flash cards).

Why do I recommend this?

Because that way a) the process of finding and noting down itself contributes to your multifacetted learning, and b) not only do you see your new words in the context of a sentence, but also the sentences in the context of a text on a topic (and this being a topic you find interesting).

This should ensure the most robust learning effect.

(One could call this "embedded learning". I don't know if the term exists, it just came to my mind while conceptualizing the idea.)

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