Fed up with flashcards? Try other word games for language learning

Flashcards are effective, but let’s be honest, they can get a little boring. That’s why I created an API for Readlang allowing any web developers to create games which you can then play with your personal words and phrases.

Sentences

Simply type the missing words, whose letters flicker to give you a clue. Look to the right of the screen for the translations. As you complete each screen you progress to more difficult levels. See which level you can reach!

Fill In The Blanks!

Drag each words or phrase at the top onto the matching sentence, making it disappear. Be quick, since once all the spaces fill up, the end game countdown begins.

It’s Your Turn!

OK, I admit the above games aren’t exactly masterpieces, but they offer a fun alternative to the usual Readlang flashcards. And more than this, they are examples that hopefully inspire you, or any programmer friends you may know, to create better games built upon the API. Some ideas for more games are:

• Word Search
• Crossword Puzzle
• Guessing Game (multiplayer) - take turns to explain a word to the other players, who have to guess what it is, a bit like the board game Articulate!. The pool of words can come from all of the players accounts. This would be awesome, but a challenge to implement well!
• …use your imagination!

Note that the API allows adding new words so it could be nice to mix in other sources of words too, not only the ones from the user’s Readlang account. One great source of example sentences is Tatoeba, and they even allow downloading their entire database of nearly three million sentences from their downloads page.

If any developers are interested in trying out the API, please take a look at Readlang API github repo which contains the API documentation as well as the source code for the Fill In The Blanks! example game. Suggestions or comments are very welcome!