Online games to practice English changed everything for a friend of mine.
Online Web Games To Play With Friends
Tell me if this sounds familiar.
These are merely suggestions of games that you might enjoy playing with your group of mates. Each of these games have their own pros and cons, and I am not suggesting that Game 1 is better than. Yahtzee If you’re into dice games, Yahtzee can be a lot of fun to play with friends. It’s a mix of skill and luck, as with most dice games, and the winner is the person who scores the most points after 13 rounds. Check out Yahtzee if you want to add a dash of fun to your next party. Nov 11, 2014 A sneaky game that you can play over the course of an entire party. Everyone has some stickers — the challenge is to stick them on people without their noticing. Get stealthy and use up all of.
My friend just couldn’t get anywhere with English class. He’s a French speaker from Canada and was studying English as a second language in school. It seemed no matter how many times he reviewed his notes and did his homework, he wasn’t able to improve.
Eventually, he stopped spending so much time studying English and just started playing online English games instead.
Many English learners have had this experience. Maybe you have, too.
The good news is that playing ESL games turned out to be the best choice my friend could’ve made for his language skills.
As he played, he’d spend hours using English to talk to his teammates and opponents in the game. And you know what? He started learning how to hold English conversations with people!
After a short while, he was using English confidently and more naturally.
This is because one of the best ways for you to learn English is to turn your hobbies into language-learning experiences. It makes English practice fun, exciting and valuable to you. It helps you to memorize vocabulary words and practice speaking and writing in English in a way that’s both fun and educational.
In this post, we’ll get you started with ten excellent, interactive online games to practice English.
We’ll start with some that were developed especially for language learners. Then we’ll show you how to practice English online just like my friend did, with multiplayer English games that native speakers play.
Educational Online Games to Practice English
Educational English games can be hit or miss (either great or terrible). In other words, they’re either really fun to play, or they’re extremely boring.
That’s why we’ve picked out the best ESL games for you. The games below were created specifically to help English language learners improve their skills. Not only does this give you focused language practice, but it also ensures you’re practicing at the right level for your skills.
The Grammar of Doom from GameZone
The Grammar of Doom is an adventure-style game where you explore secrets hidden within an old, magical temple. To get an idea of the game, imagine if Indiana Jones taught your English class.
There are a total of 10 rooms in the temple, and each room has its own series of puzzles that you have to solve using English. In order to move to the next room and eventually beat the game, you have to use your grammar and vocabulary skills to create English sentences and solve these puzzles.
Wordshake
If you like action-packed ESL games that have you working against the clock, Wordshake is right for you.
This game gives you 16 random letters of the alphabet and three minutes. During that time, you have to come up with as many English words as you can using the letters you have, and every time you make a new word, you get a point.
The letters don’t have to touch each other or be in a particular pattern like they do in crossword puzzles, and you’re able to select letters in any order.
Since there aren’t any complicated rules with Wordshake, it’s a good vocabulary-building game for beginners and advanced students alike.
FluentU
FluentU transforms authentic, entertaining English videos into fun online games to practice English.
You’ll get to watch movie trailers, music videos, inspiring talks and more, with interactive elements to keep your language skills sharp.
There are many different types of videos, as you can see here:
FluentU makes it easy to watch and understand native English videos with interactive captions. Tap or click on any word to see what it means, learn how to use it, hear it pronounced and more.
For example, if you tap on the word “brought,” then you see this:
You can learn any video’s vocabulary with FluentU’s fun quizzes. Swipe left or right to see more examples for the word you’re learning.
The videos are organized by genre and level, so it’s super easy to find the ones that work for you. FluentU also keeps track of your learning, then suggests videos and examples perfect for you.
Start using FluentU on the website or download the FluentU app from the iTunes store or Google Play store.
Beat the Keeper
Fun Interactive Games To Play With Friends Online Full
Beat the Keeper is a quiz-style online game to practice English where you have 90 seconds to answer as many sports-related questions as you can. The theme of this game is soccer, and every time you answer a question, your character takes a shot at the goal. If you answer the question correctly, you make the goal. If you’re wrong, the goalkeeper blocks your shot.
Great for building sports vocabulary, Beat the Keeper is a fun and unique approach to learning English. And since it has an easy, medium and difficult setting, it’s also suitable for language learners of all levels.
ESL Crossword Puzzles
Crossword puzzles are great for people who like a challenge, and for English language learners, they’re a good way to test your reading comprehension and vocabulary skills.
However, the crossword puzzles that you find in the Sunday newspaper are often too hard for English learners to complete. (Many of them are even too difficult for native English speakers who aren’t good at trivia, or general knowledge questions.)
Fortunately, with ESL Crossword Puzzles, you can challenge yourself with word problems that were created especially for English language learners.
The website is comprehensive and has a variety of crossword puzzles and difficulties to choose from, making it great for students of all skill levels. Just choose your level from the menu at the top of the ESL Crossword Puzzles homepage linked above.
What’s especially helpful is that you’re also able to choose from various themes, including:
- Common words in English (easy)
- Medical vocabulary (intermediate)
- English words from other languages (advanced)
Freerice
Freerice is another quiz-style game that helps you improve your vocabulary skills. Instead of answering word problems, you’re given a vocabulary word and then have to find its closest synonym out of four different words.
The game starts out easy, but with 60 levels in total, it gets much harder as you go along.
What really makes Freerice different than other online games to practice English is that the company will donate 10 grains of rice to hungry families for every question that you answer right. So the more you play, the more you’re helping those in need.
Authentic English Games for Language Practice
Along with the educational English games we just covered, you can also use authentic games that native English speakers play.
And since many of these games have multiplayer options with text and voice chat, having English conversations with your friends is easier than ever.
We’ll start off with a popular language-focused board game, then three exciting video games that English speakers love.
Scrabble Online
Scrabble might not be a game designed specifically for learning English, but it’s a great way to test your vocabulary knowledge with friends. Originally designed as a board game, you can now play Scrabble online with friends or against the computer.
The rules to Scrabble are simple. You grab seven letter squares and use them to make words. All tiles touching one another have to make a real English word, and you have to build words off of other words that’ve already been laid down. Every square has a letter and number written on it that represents the points that you get for using that letter.
As you play online, you can chat with the other players. Just type messages in the chat space to the right of the Scrabble board.
And remember, Scrabble can get very challenging towards the end, even for native English speakers. So don’t become frustrated if you struggle to make a word and have to pass on a turn. It happens to all of us!
Call of Duty
The Call of Duty series includes some of the most popular action games of all time. In these games, you play the role of a soldier, where you and your team work together to defeat the other team.
The Call of Duty games also come with a voice chat feature where you can chat, make jokes and come up with strategies with your teammates—or have conversations with anyone before and after a game starts. This is a great opportunity to practice English skills that you might not get from the classroom, like:
- Listening to different English accents, including accents of other second-language speakers
- Learning informal English and slang
- Becoming more accustomed to speakers who naturally talk quickly or slowly
League of Legends
League of Legends is a free adventure game where teams work together to complete various quests. The game has a built-in chat feature, where you can talk to people using text. But since a large portion of the game requires communicating with your teammates, a lot of people like supplementing the game with voice chat programs like Discord or TeamSpeak to talk to one another.
If your friends already have a Discord channel, simply ask them for the address to join. Otherwise, you can create your own by downloading the program and following the easy-to-understand instructions and then link them to your chatroom.
VRChat
VRChat isn’t like any other game that you’ve ever played before. In fact, it’s more like a chatroom with a video game world built into it—you even help create the world!
Simply choose your character and chat with thousands of people from across the world using text or voice chat. You’ll get to explore more than 1,000 virtual worlds and talk with new people while doing so.
Have Fun and Practice Your English
There are a number of online games to practice English with, no matter what your hobbies and interests are. Next time you want to sit down and play a game, try turning it into an English-speaking activity. That way, you’ll be practicing English without it even feeling like work.
If you liked this post, something tells me that you'll love FluentU, the best way to learn English with real-world videos.