How LingoMap works

LingoMap compares other people's courses, so you are entitled to know who pays us and what decides the order you see things in. This page answers that in plain terms.

1. No school pays to be listed

Every school and course on this site is here because we found it, checked it and thought it belonged in a directory of German courses in Berlin. No school has paid us to appear, and no school can pay us to appear.

Schools do not choose their listing either. We build it from their own public pages, and a school finds out it is listed when a student enquiry arrives — or when we email to check a detail.

A school can ask us to correct anything on its listing, and it can ask to be removed. We act on both.

2. What decides the order of the results

Nothing you cannot see. There is no paid placement, no promoted slot, and no boost of any kind. The order is:

• By default, alphabetically by course name — with two adjustments. Courses restricted to a particular group (a Jobcenter referral, a recognised refugee status) are kept out of the general list until you tick that group under "Who can join", because they cannot be booked by most visitors. And three kinds of course — business German, integration courses and one-to-one private lessons — are sorted to the bottom of the default list, because most people searching for a German course in Berlin are not looking for those. Nothing is hidden: change the sort, or use the filters, and they are all there.
• When you choose a sort — cheapest first, next start date, shortest, most viewed, best rated — that sort is applied to everything, with no exceptions and no adjustments.
• Prices are compared on one scale. Schools price per week, per month, per lesson or per whole course. To sort by price we convert each one to a monthly figure. A course whose price we could not establish sorts last rather than being guessed at.

"Most viewed" counts page views on this site. It says what other visitors looked at; it is not a recommendation and no school can influence it.

Ratings are Google's, shown with the number of reviews and refreshed regularly. We do not collect ratings of our own and we do not average, weight or adjust Google's.

3. What we receive, and from whom

Today: nothing. LingoMap has no paying customers. We earn no commission on a booking, we take no cut of your course fee, and there are no affiliate or referral links anywhere on this site — the link to a school's website is the school's own address and nothing is added to it. Your course costs you exactly what it would cost if you had never heard of us.

Our intention is to charge schools in future for the enquiries we send them. If that starts, it changes nothing about section 2 — the order of results is not for sale — and this page will say so before any money changes hands. Where a school does pay us for enquiries, the enquiry form will say so on the page, above the send button, before you submit anything.

4. Where the course data comes from

From each school's own website, and nowhere else. Every price, date, level and lesson count we publish has to be traceable to a specific sentence on a specific page of the school's site — our own software re-reads that page and refuses to publish a figure it cannot find there. That is why each course page names the page we read and the date we last checked it.

It also means we sometimes show less than a school does. A price we cannot pin to the school's own words is left blank rather than estimated. Course dates for the state-run Volkshochschulen come from Berlin's official open-data feed.

Schools change their prices, and we are not always the same day. Before you pay anything, check the figure on the school's own page — the link is on every course.

5. What happens when you send an enquiry

It goes to the one school you picked, and to no one else. We never send your details to schools you did not choose, and we never fan an enquiry out to several schools at once.

The school replies straight to your email address — we are not in the middle of that conversation. A blind copy of the email comes to us so we can see that it actually went out and help if the school does not answer.

An enquiry is not a booking, not even when you choose "I want to book a place". That sends the school a request; you have a place when the school confirms it to you.

Sending an enquiry costs nothing, and there is no account to create.

6. Who we are

LingoMap is run by one person in Berlin, not a company with a sales team. Full details are in the Imprint; what we do with your data is in the Privacy Policy.

If anything on this page turns out not to match what the site actually does, that is a bug and we want to hear about it: [email protected].