Playing Games While Listening to Comprehensible Input
A common problem folks have when first getting into listening to Comprehensible Input to naturally acquire a language is they get bored.
Fido game from Don’t Buy This.png.
This is especially true while folks are on lower levels of language listening or if there simply isn’t a lot of choice when it comes to the kind of content folks can start immersing in. Many languages don’t have an abundance of content surrounding whatever topics you’re interested in that is also comprehensible to you. This leads folks to start immersing using whatever content they can find, but pretty soon they feel restless and turn off the content. Playing video games or solo board games even, can be a solution to this.
The trick really is to keep your hands and or body active while still being able to remain present enough to listen to the comprehensible input. The same effect could be accomplished by going on a walk/run, or doing some cleaning while listening to CI. Critics will argue that this will lower the quality of input leading to more input being required to acquire the language. They are not entirely wrong! However, doing things half-assed in this case is better than those things not getting done at all. If folks never enjoy listening to CI they won’t do it, and won’t get any CI listening in.
Some popular examples of video games without a reliance on too many words which you could play while listening to CI would be Super Mario Bros, Minecraft, and Fortnite. However, there are so many games out there that can be played while listening to CI. Itch.io which is a cool platform in its own right for championing creators and having good vibes overall has a search feature which can be helpful for this. The site houses everything from game jams, comics, TTRPGs, and lots and lots of video games. They also have the ability to search by accessbility options. One of those options is “textless” which allows you to search and find games without words! Itch.io is a true treasure trove of interesting and entertaining, indie hidden gems. You can find those textless games here: https://itch.io/games/accessibility-textless.
I have recently enjoyed Slime Rancher, and I even made a collection of games on itch.io which could be played like this. You can find that collection here: https://itch.io/c/6552938/games-without-many-words. I plan on continuing to add to it as time goes on. Hopefully, this provides you something to do to stay engaged while listening to CI.
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Tags: language , learning , games