Hello everyone,
Welcome to day number 23 of the Advent Calendar.
And today, I have something REALLY special for you, and something you can maybe spend some time over the holidays:
Sneak Peek of my New Game
Back in fall, I tried out a new type of quiz for learning noun gender. The basic idea was that you don’t pick the article for a noun, but rather you pick the noun for an article.
I’ve described my idea and the added benefits in more detail in that article, so if you want to check it out, you can find it here:
German Noun Gender – New Type Of Exercise
The feedback from you was overwhelmingly positive, and I really do think there’s some potential there and so I have made that into a game. And today, you can test it.
The core task is to pick the noun (or nouns) for a given article and ignore the rest.
Getting nouns right will add them to your collection, getting them wrong will make you lose points.
You can level up, buy hints and increase difficulty little by little.
My goal was to make it an actual game, not just a language learning thing that has some game elements tacked on.
Now, right now, the nouns you train come from a small set I have prepared that you cannot customize.
But the plan is to allow you to pick which nouns to practice and also manage your collected nouns in a meaningful way.
Still a lot of work, and the layout is a bit glitchy here and there, but it’s definitely playable. And since we’re approaching Christmas and not too many people are still reading the calendar, I thought this was the perfect time to kind of show this beta-version without getting too much attention :)
I’d really love to hear all your feedback and thoughts so please share in the comments what you like, what you didn’t like and what you miss. I have lots of ideas that I want to add before it’s a proper product, but yeah… I think it’s a cool new way to practice noun gender and also lowkey learn some vocabulary along the way.
Take your time with trying it out. You need to play a while to really uncover all it has to offer.
But yeah… can’t wait for your feedback, have a great day and I’ll see you tomorrow.
“Uhm… Emanuel, how can we actually play?”
Oh, right. I forgot the most important part.
Go to this link:
The site is protected right now, but you can log in with any username (you can make one up) and the following password: Unicorn1PA!!
And then, the game starts :).
It does save your current game in the browser so you can close at any time pretty much and get back to the same game the next day.
Viel Spaß!
Dieses Spiel ist wirklich ausgezeichnet. Danke!
Great game. When you choose one word and genders of all other words are revealed, these (f), (m) and (n) are quite small and hard to see. I think maybe have them stood out more, like colour code them or maybe use a tad bigger font.
In future, would be nice to have a button near a word, to play its pronounciation.
What I love about this game is that I’m learning and reinforcing the genders of several nouns at a time, heck whole lists of ’em! I’d be very happy with a rather long list of nouns from which I have to pick 2-4 that are one gender and all the rest are a second gender.
Regarding learning noun gender – for myself, I’ve internalized quite a lot of guidelines to help with this. So, at this point I’m most interested in the “rulebreaker” nouns like Ge- nouns that are feminine or masculine, or those ending in -e that are not feminine etc. It would be great if one of the levels of increasing difficulty would be to include more “rulebreaker” nouns. But, it might be overly complicated to code this since you’d need a filter for “rulebreaker” nouns.
Looking forward to further developments!
Oh, this is relatively easy actually. I just have to exclude all those that have a “hint” associated with them. This is a nice suggestions, I’ll add it to my feature list.
Perfekt!
I couldn’t get in;(
Did you include the !! for the password?
This is super cool, helps exercise a skill that really doesn’t get enough attention. One feedback is there is an option to make more difficult by making the words in English. I didn’t select it but based on the description think it might be a step back in helpfulness since it reduces the German exposure component (increasing translation tendency). I may be misunderstanding its purpose.
It’s just an extra layer of complexity that basically sneaks in some vocabulary training.
Since it’s really only nouns we’re practicing and there is no context, meaning mapping (word in german = word in English) shouldn’t be a problem. And I’m a big big fan of flashcard vocabulary learning.
Hi Emanuel,
Password is Unicorn1PA!! including the !
Didn’t like the time factor. It was a distraction.
Oh, this is addictive. :-) I had great fun with it.
Increasing the number of options (but only having 2 genders) actually makes it easier, not more difficult, if there’s only 1 noun with the target gender.
I like this but I hate the time pressure. How can I turn it off? The words are also very basic. But it’s a good approach! Thanks for a great blog. Going on 3 years now!
Click on “levels” and then you get the button where you can remove difficulty modifiers. There should not be a timer by default though.
Hallo Emanuel
Thanks for making this year go smoothly for all the German learners here!
I’ve been following your site for almost 2 years and one thing that always stands out is the way you explain the topics, vocab and everything.
Advent calendar was good too, although I missed one part where you ask the community to tell something or some poem like last year. YDG app like website is kinda eaasy to use but we have to login everytime we open it !
and article game is helpful, I’m bad with articles and my gut feeling never helps me with it.
Hoping to learn more and more and plz make blog on indirekte rede sooonnn
Frohe Weihnachten und Happy New Year
Vielen Dank: I love this! I notice that “Medium” is shown in the game as a feminine noun (die Medium). I was pretty sure that word was neuter. Am I wrong?
Oh, I think it’s display “Medien”. I haven’t removed the plural nouns like die Medien (the media) from the dataset and it treats them as feminine right now.
Excellent. Kind of addictive, and definitely learning a lot!
You have a definite winner here. I have been returning to this in my spare time since you released it. Very fun and versatile practice tool. With the timer on it is a fast paced game requiring quick action, with it off you can do other exercises like say each word out loud, verify the translations for each option, then use one or more in a sentence. Es macht viel Spaß!
One suggestion would be to let the user choose which difficulty to add, rather than make it random. Because the different difficulty modifiers allow for the creation of a lot of different exercises, it isn’t necessarily desirable to have to wait for the one you want to come up randomly. By then you may be well into the round.
Happy to hear that it makes you come back. Yes, custom modifier setup is definitely coming. The slot machine thing is just there to get people invested and curious. Giving them all at once as options would be a bit overwhelming :)
Yes, and there is something to be said for offering goals to achieve as opposed to freebies. You could even do it like buying goodies with a certain number of points or something. That would work well, but they could maybe be persistent across rounds of a longer game, so you could play an entire round with the modifiers you want.
Looking forward to see how it progresses!
So my plan for the points is to have them called “learning points” and they represent not how well you do, but how much work you do.
And I think I already have “collections” active, While you study, you’ll complete certain “collections” or “sets”. Like “Pasta Bolognese” for example, or “body parts, part 1”. Whenever you complete a set, you get the set plus some info and you can pick on a skill tree which way you want to go next. When you complete “body parts 1” for instance, you can go “body parts 2” or “inner organs” or whatever, and add those to your current rotation.
And I got a mini game in coming up as well :)
Ausgezeichnet! Ich freue mich darauf!
Oh yes, I like it. It’s very useful, and lots of fun too. Thanks, really looking forward to seeing the final game.
I found the timer to be especially useful. Having to quickly make a guess forced me to intuit what the gender is rather than thinking about it too much. As a beginner (and someone who has no talent for foreign languages), I found my intuition was not too bad when coupled with the rules I already have learned about noun endings and other indicators about noun gender.
Hallo,
Nice :))))
Getting used to the game requires a bit of practice, but it’s a very fun way to learn new vocab and the corresponding genders :)
Definitely something very entertaining AND useful, which is a hard balance to achieve ;)
Bis morgen und danke sehr!!!
Very fun game, great idea!
This was fun and helpful! One problem I encountered a couple of times was that if you choose to cover the genders and you’re only looking for the odd one out, sometimes there were two that were alone. I’ll see if I can put a screen shot in the comments. So, then , you had to guess which word was the odd one. For example, the dots cover all of the gender being sought and the first of the two being ignored. But I can see that at least I’m ignoring “die.” In my list of seven words there are 5 feminine and one each of masculine and neuter. I have no way of knowing which you’re looking for. There should be at least one less feminine and one more of the other to ignore. I hope that makes sense.
(Couldn’t get a picture in here.)
I think I know what you mean. You had to find one word and had mixed gender distrators and they were all hidden. I didn’t think of this configuration. It really does not work. Either gender hidden or gender mixed, but not both.
Wow, you have a total winner here. I love this. It’s fun it’s addictive. I learned vocabulary as well as gender. Two comments: undecided on this, but I kind of wish it would make me get the correct gender three times before it adds to my list instead of two or maybe have that a Customized number. I felt when I only got it twice. Sometimes it was dumb luck. I do realize it puts it back in the stack, but I think I would still like for me personally to make it a three times rule. The second thing I believe when you finished a level, it didn’t pause to give you the answers displayed on the final set. It moved right away to the screen flash that moves you to the next level.
I love this game!! Didn’t score too well, but I know I’ll get better!
Even though you did a good job of explaining what to do above I was dense enough not to grasp the interface at first and got a couple wrong by trying to pair the words with the articles. Once I figured out what I was supposed to do I found this to be a very useful game. Turns out I get it right more often than I thought, but there are definitely words I don’t know.