Talking in Circles - (Play Here!)
This is a game to be played with two or more people to help practise crucial language fluency skills. Specifically:
- Verbal skills are developed by forming sentences and communicating ideas.
- Listening comprehension is utilized to understand the clues and solve the word.
- Vocabulary is increased by using new words creatively, which helps cement them in long-term memory.
Note: The words have not been filtered at this time. There may be offensive and inappropriate words until the next update is released.
Current supported languages include:
- English
- German
- French
- Spanish
- Italian
More to come!
The Talking in Circles webpage can be found here.
In essence, a round is one person getting the other player(s) to say a specific word. A game can consist of any number of rounds. Players may wish to take turns giving clues each round or switch roles after a certain number of rounds.
One round is played like this:
- One player will see a card with a word in their target language at the top. Below the target word will be 0-5 words related to the target word. No one else is allowed to look at this card.
- If you don't know a word on the card, you can click the word to see a pop-up definition.
- The clue-giver must speak in the target language to get the other player(s) to figure out the word.
- This can be done by describing the meaning of the word, or providing synonyms, or telling stories where the word might fit.
- The clue giver is not allowed to say the target word or any of the related words in any form.
- Once the other player(s) figure out the word and say it out loud, you score the word.
The game settings can be used to select the target language and to adjust the difficulty appropriately.
- The target words can be limited based on how common they are by choosing the common, uncommon, and/or rare word sets.
- The number of related words can be increased to have more restrictions or decreased to have fewer restrictions.
- A time limit can be specified for each round, so the word must be scored within that limit or else the point is lost.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International license.
Many thanks to the authors of the freely-available data tools that allowed me to build this app!
Using the following resources, I created LearningDictionaries, a free tool that can be used to create dictionaries in different languages with frequency and related word metadata.
Dictionary data for all languages comes from https://kaikki.org/dictionary/, which includes a list of words and phrases in that language, definitions in English for every sense, and related words for some words.
Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022.
Word freqeuncy data for all languages comes from wordfreq, a very useful tool that I used to obtain the frequency score of a word and a list of the most common words in a specified language.
Robyn Speer. (2022). rspeer/wordfreq: v3.0 (v3.0.2). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7199437
Extra synonyms for all languages are sourced from PyMultiDictionary, which was useful for getting related words for each target word.
Pablo R. Pizarro. (2023). PyMultiDictionary: v1.2.1. PyPi. https://pypi.org/project/PyMultiDictionary/