How gamification can help people learn a new language

Learning a foreign language has got to be high up on anyone’s list for skills they wish they had. Is anything quite as impressive as watching someone seamlessly switch from English to Polish, or English to German, or French, or Spanish, as and when the situation arises? Do you ever feel as underpowered intellectually as when you witness an infant of dual nationality turn translator, and jump in to help a parent get through a challenging interaction in their non-native tongue?

The big blocker is that learning a foreign language is incredibly difficult. It’s not just a case of and equals et and no equals nein – you’re having to learn new tenses, new genders, new peculiarities in a language that pertain to a unique culture. Think of all the weird little quirks in the English language, all the little contexts that activate different rules, and things like i before e except after c, etc., and then assume that Portuguese and Italian have just as many idiosyncrasies, if not more. You’re not just learning Morse code, or English sign language, or a system of shorthand like Pitman or Teeline, which are essentially transpositions of your own familiar language, you’re really learning the operating system for a different culture.

For example, in Vietnamese, the same sounds, intonated in many different ways, completely changes the meaning, so you could think, as a Westerner, that you’re speaking passable Vietnamese, while a native speaker could be left completely baffled, and not even aware that you were trying to speak their native language.

What is gamification?

Because of these inherent difficulties, specifically the absence of there being a “like for like” equivalency when learning a new language, it can be easy to get disheartened and lose the motivation to study. “How on earth does this mean this?” can often be the phrase new learners exclaim shortly before they abandon their language education journey. It’s undeniably tough, and hard to quantify. One proven way to make learning a new language slightly easier, or rather, more engaging, and to keep motivation high, even when learning particularly difficult areas, is gamification.

Gamification is when you make a game of something that’s not traditionally thought of as being fun, or finding the fun in something boring or hard in order to get through it. It’s a practice that almost every single person reading this will have experienced at some point, but might not be aware it had a name. In the interests of clarity, I can tell you that if you’ve ever participated in an escape room as part of a team building event, you’ve participated in a gamified experience. If you’ve ever been asked to perform an interactive section of a job application that posed different scenarios and asked you how you’d respond to them, you’ve participated in a gamified experience. If you’ve got Strava on your phone and you’ve ever taken part in a brand’s monthly challenge, where you get a digital finishers badge and an opportunity to win a real prize, you’ve taken part in a gamified experience.

Games and gamification achieve higher rates of user motivation

Gamification is the most effective method to engage and motivate users, whatever the industry, and whatever the function. In those prior examples we listed corporate gamification, and gamification for health, but if there is a challenge that can be overcome by better audience engagement, or the main solution can be served by better audience engagement, gamification and gamified content is the best course of action. By appealing to people’s intrinsic motivations, whether that’s their desire for competition, their hunger for a challenge, or their fear of breaking a streak and losing progress, applying game mechanics and game design principles can make anything more appealing and more effective.

One area gamification might be the most natural fit for is education – everybody loves to play, and play is the default mechanism for humans to acquire knowledge and develop skills. That’s how people learn before they go to school and officially become students engaged in formal learning. Even most education systems have built-in elements of gamification, even if they’re not utilised in a playful and effective way. For example, classes and ability sets are like levels, and grading systems are a bit like scoring.

Modern gamification goes a step further by making things digital and mimicking video games. This digitally gamified content is highly effective as it works on shorter feedback cycles than more traditional learning, which most people are more conditioned to through playing video games and using social media, and generally interacting with things virtually more than through books and manual methods. Using gamified online content as part of, or in place of more traditional learning methods helps to make elements of the education process into a more fun activity, which really is the key to improving user engagement, and in the simplest terms, is everything gamification is about.

How do you learn a new language?

So how do we gamify for educational purposes? Once we decide upon our objective, how do we begin to use gamification to achieve our desired outcomes?

In the case of learning a new language, and most subjects, effective gamification really all comes down to levels. The ability level of the student, and the level the student is looking to achieve.

Advantages to gamifying language learning for all ages

Using gamification for learning a second language offers some undeniable advantages. Because of the online format of modern gamification experiences, which can be easily created on the Drimify games creation platform, a player, or student’s performance can be constantly analysed and kept on track. If they’re constantly interacting with experiences in the game, answering questions on customised Quizzes and such like, it’s easy for teachers to monitor their results by how they’re answering questions.

Essentially, gamification and game based learning is all just a more advanced form of learning. You’re taking the convenience of a format that can work remotely as well as at education centres, and amplifying the interactive elements to make the students more autonomous, and encourage them to take far more responsibility for their education. You’re using gamification as much as anything else to get students to buy in to their own success in their studies.

Learning a new language for school students

School students are simultaneously in the best possible position to pick up a new language as they have so much more mental plasticity and capacity to learn than adults, but also too inexperienced in many cases to appreciate that position, nor the value that knowing a foreign language could add to their future lives. In English speaking countries, language learning is a great microcosm of the adage that youth is wasted on the young.

Gamification represents a great way to overcome this for educators, as gamifying language learning can connect the nuts and bolts of learning a new language, with the more fun, and more interesting cultural elements. By using the Dynamic Path™ on the Drimify format, you can create a multi level learning game all around the more fun and engaging side of learning a new language: the culture, the practical elements, and the more interesting parts which can sometimes get missed from a curriculum.

By customising a series of Quizzes, for example, with pop-up content like video and audio, you can really tap into their foreign language listening skills, whether that’s picking up on key sentences or meanings from scenes on foreign films, or exposing them to different foreign dialects. You can also expand their understanding of different areas of the countries whose language they’re learning, but by keeping it in the target language, the language learning becomes secondary, but reinforced – almost like how some children learn English through playing video games – it serves them to pick and absorb the new language.

Learning a new language as adults

Adults present a different challenge to teachers. For the casual learner looking for a way to pass the time and pick up a little conversational Spanish for their holiday to Cancun, numerous gamified apps exist, but if you were looking to go into more detail, or it was for a business trip and you needed a team to have passable Mandarin, it might make sense to create a serious games using that same Dynamic Path™ format as mentioned previously.

The major challenge teachers can run into with adult students is a level of negativity about their ability to effectively pick something up because they understand how complex and vast the overall topic actually is. Children can talk about wanting to be astronauts, but adults have a rough idea of the odds, and can appreciate that for all 565 people that have ever made it into space, there were thousands of the best and brightest in their hometowns who didn’t make the cut. The key with this type of serious game would be to be realistic, specific, and honest with the content. Because it’s aimed at helping adults learn topically about a foreign language, it can be more specific, and more serious in its execution.

Gamification is the best path forward to better language learning

Ultimately, nothing is going to make learning a new language easy. It’s an absolutely enormous topic, even picking one of the “easier” languages which people consider to have shorter paths to fluency still makes up a whole language, with its own A to Z, which is literally an actual A to Z, and just a metaphor for something being comprehensive.

The key to learning something so challenging is user engagement, so by gamifying, and tapping into intrinsic motivations, you’ll give your students their best chances of success, whether they’re adult learners, or school students. Gamification applies a structure to the learning process, makes it bitesize, and can arrange it into connective quests that build up a larger whole that gradually slots together. It can depict progress and advancement through levels and points, and can indicate a streak of good behaviour, and that can motivate learners to protect and nurture that achievement.

The bright future of language learning

Modern gamification is built on powerful mobile and internet technology. Any game created on the Drimify platform is designed mobile first, and can be played on smartphone, a tablet, or a computer, making our gamified experiences highly versatile as well as easy to customise. However, as effective as gamification is today, it’s only going to get more sophisticated and more effective as technology keeps advancing.

Advances in virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI) mean that the serious learning games of the future will be mind blowing to today’s audience. Engagement will be supercharged by complete virtual immersion, and powerful AI integrations in creation platforms will make customising and improving learning games even easier and more efficient than today’s high standard.

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