I mentioned in my last post that my teacher used games a lot as a teaching tool, so I figured I would write more about that here because I felt it was such an impactful part of my learning experience.

The basis of most of the games was basically to trick us into speaking German freely while also keeping it light and fun. One of my favorite games was one where we were given photos of famous people and we had to describe them to the class in German, and the class would try guess who our person was. It was a perfect way to use some of the words that we had learned for that section of the book (berühmt, Politiker, various country and place names names, etc.). The game also forced us to use different cases and tenses in German, which is really difficult but also important to practice.

Another game that we played which was really fun and very active was called “Artikelchaos.” All the students sit on chairs in a circle with one standing and each of them is given one of the three articles (der, die, or das). The person in the middle says a word, “Apfel” for instance, and whoever has the article for that word (“der” in this case) must get up and change seats while the person in the middle tries to sit down in one of the seats that become available. It ends up being really chaotic (hence the name) as people are swapping seats and trying not to be the one in the middle. I found this game to also be really important to me, since as a native English speaker I am not used to having so many different articles for words.

Lastly, since we are near the end of our course, our teacher wanted to play a game that was completely for fun. She bought in a stack of cards with various sentences in German and also mouth pieces to put in our mouth like the kind you would find at the dentist (you can see me wearing it in the picture below). We had to attempt to pronounce the German sentence with the mouth piece in while our teammates would guess at what we were saying. Of course we also had to try not laugh or drool on ourselves in the process, which also proved to be very difficult. Before long the whole class was laughing at how ridiculous we all sounded. I found that it was a great way to end the last few minutes of class and leave me excited to go on learning German.