There aren’t a lot of games out there for language learners and even fewer for German. To clarify what is meant by “German Learning Games”, I only count those things that not only seek to entertain, but focus on the educational part. There are a lot of games that claim to be “Language Learning Games”, but they missed the “learning” part of their name. The ones on this list get it all right.
Der Die Das Rockets
Der Die Das Rockets is an Android and iOS app that aims to help you remember the genders of over 300 German nouns. It is fun to play, has a great story to go with it and the animation is adorable. The general premise is that a city is being attacked with rockets with words written on them. You have to swipe in the correct direction in order to detonate them before they reach the city. The direction you swipe is dependent on the gender of the noun. Swipe up for feminine, down for masculine and right for neuter.
There are 8 categories with 8 levels in each. Each level includes 6 words. This brings the total number of words in this game to 384. The categories of vocabulary include: body, animals, work, house, food, city, nature and mixed. The vocabulary in the “mixed” category doesn’t really fit into any of the other categories. Things like “Beispiel”, “Frage”, “Anfang” and “Angst”.
I love this app and couldn’t recommend it more highly. It is simply fantastic. You won’t find a better vocabulary trainer for $0.99 anywhere. If you want to read a full review of Der, Die, Das Rockets, click here.
Babadum
With a name like that, you know it has to be good. Babadum is essentially a gamified flashcard app. You don’t get to choose the vocabulary. Instead it chooses the most used 1500 words in a language and shows them as fun (and sometimes funny) images. There are a variety of ways to play. You can have a word with four images, an image with four words, a spoken word with four images, an image with a list of letters to spell it with, or you can shuffle them all. It always says the word out loud when you choose it and it will show you the correct answer if you answer incorrectly. The only downside is that it doesn’t include the article, which is pretty important in German. Here is Herr Antrim’s full review of Babadum.
GermanGames.net
As the name implies, these are a variety of games dedicated to teaching you German. The site and the games look like they were made in the late 90s, but the educational aspect is there, so I thought I should include it. Now go catch flies with a frog and learn German vocabulary.
Digital Dialects
This website is ancient in terms of the internet, but it has a quality that stands the test of time. It offers a variety of games to help you learn vocabulary and a few grammar topics. They are mostly “click the item that matches” type games, but they are entertaining enough and my students seem to enjoy them.
These games, however, will only cover the very basic level things you need to learn. If you are at the A1 level, you will get a lot out of this site. Of course, I have a review for this site, too. Apparently they have released an update to the site since that review, which changes the layout considerably, but the games remain pretty much the same.
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