Improve your English with these online games
Match the word and picture games
When you are at the beginning of your language learning journey, matching words and pictures are the easiest games to start with. There are lots of Memory games, which means you have a grid of cards, which you click on to reveal either a word or a picture. You try and remember where the word or picture that matches that one is, revealing two at a time each turn. The game continues until you match them all. These ones are good for getting your brain out of just practising vocabulary lists, but also putting an image to the word. Some good ones to try are this Concentration game (another name for the same type of game) and this vocabulary memory game that also says each word out loud.
Hangman
This sounds pretty nasty, and now that I think about it, it is a bit grim, but we used to play this as kids all the time. Your opponent thinks of a word, and you need to guess what it is letter by letter. You have a limited number of guesses, and each time you guess wrong, your opponent draws one more part of a gallows with a stick figure hanging from the rope. There is no way of making this sound nicer than it is, sorry! There are quite a few versions of this online, you can try this Hangman game which is for English learners, or this one for English kids. It can be a little difficult as you’re guessing each letter, but start with the vowels and you’ll soon learn some new words.
Crossword puzzles
I like crossword puzzles because the clues you’re given are a bit more challenging and interesting, and often involve new vocabulary words themselves. When you’re expanding your language knowledge, there comes a time when you need to learn a few different words for the same concept, or need to practise how to describe things. Crossword puzzles are good practice for this. You can try easy ones for English learners like these ones, which are probably best as there are a lot of cultural references and puns, even in easy puzzles, that would be hard to guess as an English learner.
Scrabble
Stretch your vocabulary muscles, or at least how many words you remember, with a good game of online Scrabble. You’re trying to get as many points as possible with letter placement, so this isn’t so much testing your knowledge of the meanings of words, or sentences, but just how many can you remember? I find myself trying to remember how to spell things I barely remember, and trying really hard to bring all those vocabulary words to mind. You can play a Scrabble-like game online here.
Games just for English learners
There are sites full of games just for learning English, and they have some good ones – like rearranging words to make a complete sentence, popping balloons to get the right verb tenses, and more. A good one to try is Games to Learn English, which includes Hangman and some simple memory games, plus sentence ordering, description, and more. There is also ESL Games Plus, which is a little bit slow to load and use due to the high number of ads, but has a wide range of options too.
Now that you’ve had some fun, it’s time to book in your next Lingoda lesson!
