Where Germany learns Chinese: 795 places, counted one by one

We counted on 7 November 2026, on our own map, Gushi Laoshi. As far as we know, nobody else publishes a current count. The newest figures we found are years old and cover schools only. Below are the numbers, how they spread across the country, and how we got them. You may quote them with a link to this page.

The numbers at a glance

On top of these, 44 teachers in Germany teach Chinese online on their own. We count them apart, because they have no classroom.

More than one in four places where Germany learns Chinese is a Volkshochschule, a public adult education centre.

By state: the South leads, the East has half

North Rhine-Westphalia has the most places, 175. Per person, Baden-Württemberg leads with 1.32 places for every 100,000 people. That is three and a half times as many as in Saxony-Anhalt.

The five eastern states, without Berlin, have 63 places. That is 0.51 per 100,000 people, about half of the rest of the country (1.03).

By city: one in five places is in nine cities

Berlin counts with its districts. These nine cities hold 164 places, about one in five. The rest is spread wide: 221 of the 343 towns have exactly one place. For many people, that one place is the local Volkshochschule.

Bremen, Cologne, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Bielefeld, Augsburg and Ulm follow with 8 places each. Every town has its own page on Gushi Laoshi, with all its places: Chinese by city.

Most courses are for beginners

554 places say which levels they teach.

• 172 of them stop at A1. That is 31 percent.
• 226 stop at A2 or lower. That is 41 percent.
• At the Volkshochschulen it is clearer still: 125 of 216 teach only A1, 58 percent.

So starting is easy almost everywhere. Going on is harder. If you are past A1, look at universities (many have evening courses open to everyone), Confucius Institutes, private language schools, or lessons online.

When the classes are

417 places name their days. Tuesday is the most common day (202 places), then Wednesday (188), Monday (174) and Thursday (170). Friday has 121, Saturday 94, Sunday 24.

348 places name their times. 226 of them, two in three, teach in the evening, from 5 pm on. Chinese in Germany is mostly an evening class after work.

The weekend belongs to the weekend schools. 32 of the 40 that name their days teach only on Saturday or Sunday. Most of them teach children of Chinese-speaking families.

Children, online, HSK

• 219 places have courses for children. 126 of them are secondary schools, where Chinese is a school subject.
• 313 places also teach online. Across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, 341 offers teach online and explain in German.
• 614 of the 637 places that name a teaching language explain in German.
• 21 places are official HSK test centres, where you can take the Chinese proficiency exam.

The textbooks they use

196 places name a textbook. The seven most named:

Lóng neu is a school book, so it leads because of the secondary schools. Zhongwen and Yuwen are the books of the weekend schools. Gushi follows five of these seven lesson by lesson, with every word of a lesson and a story for each character: textbooks in Gushi.

How we counted

• Every place comes from its own pages. We read each school's website between October and November 2026: kind of place, levels, days, times, and whether it teaches online. Where a page says nothing, we count it as not known, never as no.
• The 126 secondary schools come from the list of the Fachverband Chinesisch, the German association of Chinese teachers (January 2024). The list does not say if every course still runs.
• A school with several sites counts once for every site we list.
• States come from each place's position on the map. Population: Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), end of 2024, 83.6 million.
• It is not complete. Private tutors without a website, company courses and many small clubs are missing. Every school can add itself on Gushi Laoshi for free, and the numbers here grow with it.

We build Gushi, an app for learning Chinese characters, and Gushi Laoshi is ours too. We have no school of our own, and no place pays to be counted.

Where to go from here

To find a course near you, open the map, or read how to find a Chinese school. Between lessons, an app keeps the words fresh: the best apps for HSK 3.0 compares seven, ours too. Gushi is one month free, then a subscription. See the app.

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