Top 5 games for learning English

Adrienne Hughes
5 days ago
2 min read

Learning a language can be a lot of fun. You can read books, watch films, sing songs and talk to people in the language you’re learning. You can also play some games.

Here are my five favourite games and activities which can help you learn English.

1. Articulate for Kids

This is such a fun game. The task is to describe as many words as possible within a short period of time. Sometimes the words refer to objects, other times you have to describe famous people or words associated with nature or the world. You might need to describe robin, holly, octopus or the Eiffel Tower. You aren’t supposed to say any of the words in the answer so this forces you to think of synonyms. Don’t be put off by the fact that the game is for kids, it should still be enough of a challenge. One shortcoming is that some of the words you need to describe are a bit out of date but if you can ignore those ones, you’ll still have a lot of fun.

2. Dobble

In this game you have to spot which item appears on two cards. It’s a mystery to me how this game works but it is based on some clever mathematics. To play the game requires no maths knowledge, just a quick brain which notices the pair and can also say the name of it in English. Great for kids.

3. Stadt, Land, Fluss

This is a game that you can make with just some paper and pens. I usually do four categories and four letters. If you want to focus on improving your English choose one or two categories such as adjectives to describe people or abstract nouns. Other categories you can choose include things in this room, animals, countries, colours and sports.

4. Pictionary for kids

This game is about drawing pictures which your team mate has to guess. Again there is lots of language involved as you have to do a lot of thinking on your feet to try to work out what the picture might be.

5. Doing a jigsaw puzzle together

I know this might sound strange – after all, you don’t need to do a lot of talking when you are doing a jigsaw puzzle. However, jigsaws take a lot of time and that time could be spent listening to an English podcast, listening to songs in English or just having a chat with the fellow jigsaw puzzler. Maybe treat yourself to a jigsaw featuring an English scene and decide to practice your English while you are doing it.

Other ideas

For those of you with more advanced English, you might want to play Scrabble. Other word games include Boggle and Bananagrams. Charades is another good option; This is a game where you have to mime the name of a film, book, song or TV programme. There are also many online games, such as Spelling Bee from the New York Times. And another of my favourite games worth mentioning is Set. I don’t think it will help your English much but it is a good one to play with kids.