Posted on by Peter Rettig

Language Learning with "German - A Game A Day"

German - A Game A Day image During one month in 2014, we created a game a day for German and were encouraged by the response.

We're now continuing to make German "Quick Games," at the pace of about one a week. As these games can be played without registering, we are looking forward to attracting more players to our site. 

Playfully vs With Effort

A recent article When It Hurts (and Helps) to Try: The Role of Effort in Language Learning reinforced our idea that games make language learning more effective: Learning can occur "playfully" rather than "with effort." (We'll discuss this article in a later blog.)

Several months before, we'd started adding "Quick Games" to our 36-lesson language courses and already have over 100 games for our four languages (plus a few Quick Games for our course "Inglés para hablantes de español," currently under development, with 3 lessons online.)

They include Trivia Quizzes, games for numbers, days-of-the-week games, common verbs, common phrases. We've begun posting our German games, on our new Learn German Facebook page (link below). 

German - A Game A Day

During our one-month German - A Game A Day "experiment," we created and added a language game daily. We took one or two German words or expressions and put them into a game to teach and practice certain grammar points.

For example, the first few games practice the gender of compound German words, present tense verb forms, separable-prefix verbs, verb/subject inversion for questions, how the article for a masculine direct object changes, etc.

The games let the user discover key grammatical structures on his or her own, and provide brief explanations that sometimes confirm a learner's insights. Click here for: Learn German Facebook page