One of the most popular ways to learn languages these days is through language learning apps. They’re great for so many reasons – in the place of paying for classes or a tutor, they’re a load off the budget. They work on your smartphone and can be accessed nearly anywhere at any time. And most importantly, their format is very engaging and makes it easy to feel motivated to get in at least a small amount of time building up the foundations of your knowledge of the language you’re learning.
Although in important ways, our language learning apps are doing what our classrooms for language classes did at school, they pattern on our phones with gaming apps we use to pass the time on mass transit. Making learning fun is a great thing, and the gamification of language-learning apps is one way that we can do that. Let’s find out how games in language apps help us learn better.
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What Is The Use Of Interactive Games In Learning?
Learning languages can be really fun, especially once you start to feel like you have some foundation on which to stand. There’s no reason not to think of it as a game. However, it’s important to stay focused on the goal as much as the process. The most fun part about learning a language should be in being able to speak it to other people, read things written in it, translate in and out of it, and write in it yourself.
This is as true whether your reason for learning a language is professional development where you will be judged based on your ability to use the language in a job context and not how many days long your streak on an app is, or personal communication – your family don’t want to see your exercises, they want to speak with you.
Don’t lose your sense of fun. Hopefully, this blog post will help you increase the amount of fun you’re having with language learning as you go, but to do so in the right ways and at the right times!
Gamification Of Language Learning Apps
Gamification in language learning apps has been a big selling point. We might call it a net win for more time spent by students practicing and learning. Many students use language learning apps in addition to other media (audio/videos, classes, etc.), and having a game-like means to engage with the material in their free time helps them a lot, and their teachers agree!
But for many other students, language learning apps make up the primary or even only means they have to study the language they’re learning in a structured way. There’s nothing wrong with that as such, but it’s all the more important to take your language learning apps seriously in terms of the time you spend on them, and how you use it.
It can get really easy to spot patterns in language, in fact, that’s mostly how we learn them! But sometimes the patterns of the language itself combined with the patterns of the app become shortcuts. If this happens too much, it can actually undermine how much learning we’re doing while using the app!
For example, an app might offer you multiple choice answers for translation, and one very specific detail makes it so that even if it was your first day with the language, you could pick the correct answer: for example, perhaps the prompt is to choose the correct translation of a sentence that happens to be a question, and of the three multiple choice answers, only one has a question mark. You’ll get the answer right, you’ll get your points, but you may not have read a single word in either language!
It’s easy enough to tell you to pay attention to that, or to resist that urge, but this can fail in practice because you feel like your task is unchanged. You want to pick the correct answer, and you already know what it is. If you notice this happening, try to reframe your task as translating all the words in the correct answer in isolation, or translating the incorrect answers, and choosing the correct answer as a mere formality to move on.
It’s a small mental effort that can yield bigger practical results!
How Can Games In Language Apps Help You Learn?
Timed challenges can be a great way to force you to review a lot of vocabulary quickly if that’s something you’re struggling with, but it can also be a way to avoid spending the same amount of time on something else because it’s easier if it’s not something that you’re struggling with. I would even go so far as to say you should place minimum importance on the more optional gamified aspects of your app experience. Instead of letting the app set you point-based and game-like goals, try to assess for yourself what your weaknesses are and focus your learning more on overcoming those weaknesses.
Go over exercises again and again if they repeatedly cover things that just aren’t sticking, like perhaps the case morphology of German, or irregular verbs in Malayalam, or just difficult vocabulary for whichever language. Skip over exercises or challenges that aren’t helping you in areas you know you need it, even if they help with your “points” and your “game” status. Focus more on the things that will help you more with finding things to look up, or directly with speaking, listening, writing, and reading!
If that makes it sound like I want you to take your language learning app use more seriously, you’re correct! But if it sounds like I’m trying to take the fun out of things altogether, try not to fret! First of all, you don’t have to listen to me. I won’t be able to check if you don’t take my advice in any way whatsoever. But it sure would be good for you to try to keep it in mind a little bit, and see how the results serve you!
But there’s another reason not to be upset if it sounds like I’m trying to take some of the fun out of your language learning app experience…
Gamifying your off-app experience to take the pressure off of the in-app experience.
I realize this is going to be more of me telling you to put more effort into being creative about your language learning experience, but language is an effortful thing, and a creative thing! It’s good to take it seriously if you want to have fun with it!
Learning Through Play: Make Your Language Learning Experience Fun
There are a few ways to make your off-app time more fun that can complement your treating your on-app time a bit more as a study.
First of all is take up aspects of writing in the language you’re learning as a hobby! In the old days, this would’ve meant finding a pen pal, but I would recommending getting a Twitter account in which you tweet only in the language you’re learning, and only follow accounts in that language!
Another great thing you can do to make practicing the language off of your language learning app more fun is to “gamify” your conversations! I know that sounds a bit strange, but let me explain.
When you’re speaking a new language with other people, you’ll be very self-conscious of yourself for making mistakes, or just afraid that you’re going to make a mistake. Of course, mistakes are part of learning, and it’s very easy for me to tell you to just get over it. But there’s another thing you can do, in the moment of insecurity, which can actively help you with your speaking as well as make the experience feel a bit more like a game.
Sometimes, when you’re saying a slightly longer sentence (it doesn’t have to be SUPER long, but let’s say more than a couple of words), you’ll feel like you’re stumbling over some difficult of the grammar. In the exact moment when you realize what’s happening, especially if you’re not sure which of multiple constructions to use, commit to the following: say it the first way that comes to mind, then, immediately try to say it one or two other ways, rephrasing it so that the structure is markedly different. If this were English, imagine saying:
“These are not the ones that I would have wanted to see… I didn’t want to see these ones… of the ones that I wanted to see, these were not among them.”
You might get all of them wrong on your first try! But you’ll be getting more practice in rapidly, you’ll be meeting a “game-like” challenge you’ve set for yourself, and maybe the people you’re speaking with will see what’s going on and offer some help or advice or insight. It should lighten the mood at least!
There’s another thing I like to do mid-conversation when practicing some languages that have markedly different accents between different groups of native speakers (Turkish, Arabic, Persian). When something about the sentence you’re saying makes you think of such an accent, maybe it’s the spelling, maybe it’s remembering the person who taught you a specific word or phrase, repeat it again in the best impression of the specific accent on your mind. This can help you overall with pronunciation, it might make your interlocutors laugh, and I think it’s fun!
Interactive Games In Language Learning Apps: Ling
If you’re already using a language-learning app and are fully satisfied with it, that’s great. I did want to take a little time at the end of this article to talk about the Ling app. This gamified app boasts one of the widest selections of languages of any language learning app on the market and is particularly inclusive of diverse Slavic languages, official languages of Southeast Asian countries, and many languages from the Indian Subcontinent! I love this about Ling, and I hope you’ll try it if the language you’re learning fits into this category. For some languages like Amharic or Khmer, this may be the only app to offer courses!
Another great thing about Ling is the team behind it – people who are themselves passionate language students and teachers, and who want to build up Ling’s status as a community.
In addition to the app, blogs like this one, and video content across apps like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc., Ling has a dedicated Discord server where you can discuss your language learning journey with other users. Because of the diversity of languages served by Ling, there are a lot of different kinds of experience and insight you might be able to get from new friends that would be harder to find anywhere else.
You can download Ling from the App Store and Google Play Store
