Learning Lower Sorbian/Wendish works rather differently from learning big languages. There is, for example, no "home region" where you might be forced to use the language in everyday life with locals. (School lessons in the region have always been held in German, which is why every Wend in Lower Lusatia can now speak German as well.)
Then there is no mobile app like Duolingo or Babbel that introduces you to the language in a playful way, and hardly any media such as series, feature films or podcasts with which you could experience the natural language. Even so, getting started is possible – you just have to make do with a somewhat sparser offering. And learning is worthwhile, especially for anyone who does not yet speak a Slavic language or fancies broadening their horizons.
Here is a list of resources that may be helpful for anyone still looking.
There is no app, but the website "Sorbisch Online Lernen" ("Learn Sorbian Online") offers an online course for beginners up to level B1 that follows a playful concept. The comic story conveys cultural context as well as natural language. Navigation and operation take some getting used to, and anyone who already has prior knowledge may find the progress too slow.
Once you have completed the course, you can use the exercises of "Kšac pó kšacu" ("Step by Step") from the Witaj Language Centre to consolidate your grammar. Although these are aimed at schoolchildren, adults with prior knowledge also benefit from the demanding learning games.
Another option is the Instagram account "Niedersorbisch Lernen" ("Learn Lower Sorbian"), where you can follow the author as she learns and find out a lot about grammar, vocabulary and cultural context.
"Niedersorbisch praktisch und verständlich" ("Lower Sorbian, Practical and Easy to Understand") by Erwin Hannusch – also called "the blue book" – is regarded as the standard work for adults. It is comprehensive, but not entirely free of errors, and the brief descriptions of grammar are not always easy to understand.
The texts and topics seem partly outdated, as the book first appeared in 1999. Two useful audio CDs are included, but in an age when hardly anyone still owns a player, that is likely to pose problems. No online resources are available for it.
Manfred Starosta also published the book "Niedersorbisch schnell und intensiv" ("Lower Sorbian, Quick and Intensive") (1991), about whose quality I cannot say anything. I am not aware of more recent learning materials for adults for self-study.
Unfortunately there is no monolingual dictionary for Lower Sorbian. Anyone who does not speak German is out of luck here. For German speakers, however, dolnoserbski.de offers dictionaries in both translation directions: the German–Lower Sorbian Dictionary (DNW) and the dictionary by Manfred Starosta (1999). The latter shows its age particularly in the example sentences, in which a questionable image of women sometimes shines through.
I would also like to recommend the Sorbian volume in the Kauderwelsch series, which covers both Sorbian languages. Upper Sorbian dominates once again (though not on the cover), but you learn a lot about the differences and similarities.
As is well known, you learn most effectively when you get in touch with others. Anyone who has nine months to spare can complete a language scholarship with "Zorja". The project trains ten people a year in an intensive language programme, and they then reach a level between B1 and C1.
For those with less time, the School for Lower Sorbian Language and Culture in Cottbus offers courses all year round at various levels of difficulty, fields of application and course intervals, including online. A highlight is the one-week intensive course held every year in the first week of the holidays. In 2025, 100 people took part, a record. The outdated website with a monolithic PDF events calendar should not put you off.
The media landscape of the Lower Sorbs is still largely stuck somewhere in the 20th century. Digitalisation is progressing only slowly, and tradition often still dictates how something appears online. There are certainly good reasons for this, above all a lack of staff and money.
The weekly newspaper "Nowy Casnik" appears in print every week and is so cheap that there is hardly any reason not to subscribe. The website, too, is updated once a week.
The children's magazine Płomje comes out once a month and offers learners exercises and games, simple texts with vocabulary lists and a jokes page – an absolute recommendation, for adults too. Online, the individual issues can be viewed in their print layout, but not centrally on the magazine's own website; instead they are hidden in the news page of the Witaj Language Centre. There is an RSS feed only for all Witaj news, not selectively for the Płomje magazine.
The cultural magazine Rozhlad (published monthly) apparently offers the occasional Lower Sorbian contribution alongside Upper Sorbian ones.
The annual calendar Serbska Pratyja comes out every year and offers, besides the calendar, plenty of interesting texts on all sorts of subjects. Including recipes, etc. – but first and foremost a print product.
Books can mostly be obtained from the Domowina-Verlag. Second-hand, for instance, also at the Lodka in Cottbus – but be careful with books from GDR times: they follow an outdated orthography that can trip learners up (the letter ó is missing, for example, or i has in places been replaced by ě).
The monthly TV magazine "Łužyca" on RBB television is recommendable in terms of content and production, but is offered with burned-in German subtitles, which makes it harder for learners to watch.
The RBB's daily Lower Sorbian radio programme is elaborately produced, including music, features and news. In the media library, however, you only find a confusing list of programmes without summaries. More practical are the short language segments to listen to again – a gem for learners hidden on a separate page. It would be nice if one could listen to all of this with a podcast app. You cannot help yourself here; downloading as a file is not provided for anywhere.
What does not exist: independently produced material, that is, a YouTube channel or podcast with regular content and natural, spoken language. One exception is the material that Gregor Wieczorek uploaded to YouTube about a decade ago. Here you can listen to authentic speakers and learn more about intonation, pronunciation, filler words and situational expressions than any current course teaches.
Mostly older native speakers can be heard in some archive recordings. On dolnoserbski.de there are more than 100 hours of recordings from the years 2011 to 2015. These were designed as a research resource and have been laboriously transcribed and translated. All persons are anonymised, names "bleeped out". The site is useful for learners above all when they are looking for particular words from the "village language" or are interested in an "authentic" pronunciation.
For listening through the often historically interesting conversations, however, the website is less suitable: an 80-minute conversation, for example, stretches across a staggering 125 individual pages with 15 lines of text each – so when reading along you have to turn the page more than once per minute. Instead I recommend saving the audio files locally and extracting the text from the pages with a web scraper. (I have done this and am happy to help on request.)
In addition, the "Sprachkarte Niederlausitz" ("Language Map of Lower Lusatia") holds sound recordings by the Sorbian Institute from the period 1952 to 1971. What is exciting is that many of the speakers were born in the 19th century. There is, however, neither transcription nor translation for them.
Is anything still missing?
Automatically translated with Claude.