Hey dear students.
Here you can find a link to a very helpful tool: www.duden.de.
This dictionary is the gold standard for our German language. So if you search a word, it gives you very valuable information about it, for example about similar words, grammar structure etc. etc.
Enjoy to discover it 
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If you need a translation tool for German words (since Duden is mono-lingual), I highly recommend pons.de. It has the most reliable results, from my experience, and doesn’t give you obscure, archaic translations 
It’s also available for many other languages, too 
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Sure, Pons is also great. For a fast search I also use linguee.com. The advantage of this website is that they show some texts of their search engine where the searched word appears. So you can read it in a context which helps you to get a better understanding.
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Speaking of Duden, I spent a couple hours looking for a good real-life physical paper dictionary last time I was in Germany, and found this gem:
Duden, Standardwörterbuch, Deutsch als Fremdsprache
It’s amazing. It gives multiple example sentences for each word, lists synonyms at the end of every definition, has the articles for nouns, includes how nouns get pluralized, and lists IPA pronunciation. Hard to explain how useful this is until you start using it on a regular basis.
I use the book pretty regularly when I’m reading a German-language book and I don’t know a word. It saves me having to open my computer or my phone, which have a lot of distraction potential built-in.
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I typically use Leo. https://www.leo.org/german-english/
Anyone have any opinions on this one?
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Shannon, I use Leo as well and I think it’s pretty good!
I also recommend deepl.com for more complex sentences, they even have a very useful plugin!
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duden.de is also very helpful if you just need to check something really quick. Let’s say you forgot the article of a noun or the participle of a verb. What I do, I just type that word + duden into google/my browser (very convenient).
The duden.de pages are always structured the same way, so once you get used to it you’ll find whatever information you’re looking for very quickly.
duden.de offers an audio file with the pronunciation, some example sentences, synonyms and declination and conjugation tables. It goes beyond what you would find in a bilingual dictionary. So you can always look up a word in a bilingual dictionary (my favourites are linguee.de and dict.cc) and then go to duden to deep dive.
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@Shannon, what I like about leo.org are the discussions at the bottom of the search results page. When I’m really not sure about a translation, I will usually check if there’s something in the leo discussions. Always very helpful when natives explain the meaning of a word with examples…
(dict.cc has the same feature, but not as intuitive)
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Ha ha @neilgrey, cool stickers!
Thanks for all your suggestions, I’ll share mine too: Wordreference. I’ve been using this one especially for French-English translation but they also have a German-English and many many more dictionaries available. To me it’s the perfect tool!
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