While the last few years have seen the emergence of several great education programs like Babbel, Duolingo, and Rosetta Stone that offer a gamified version of language learning, we are now at the point that there are also straight-up games with actual game mechanics that are focused on language learning. This list collects the four language learning video games that I am currently most impressed with, as well as one upcoming game that has yet to release. I personally have been working on learning Korean, so this list is targeted to games that offer Korean as an option, but these games all offer multiple target languages (which I have listed).
Lingo Legend
Languages: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish
Lingo Legend is the most direct competitor to something like Duolingo, except it swaps out an abstract educational setting for a fantasy RPG where you fight monsters while learning letters, vocabulary, and eventually phrases. There’s also an in-progress gardening mode, for people like me who have already hit the max level in the original game. I would highly recommend Lingo Legend to anyone with even a casual interest in learning a language, as it’s just a really well designed card-based RPG. I have personally played Lingo Legend for countless hours, and my referral code is NYHPE (if you want to help me get more unique cosmetics like the raccoon suit shown in the screenshots).
From Lingo Legend’s website, you can easily download it for free for either Android or iOS (though there is a premium subscription, which I bought the lifetime version of).
Linguist FPS
Languages: Chinese Mandarin (Simplified) as well as Pinyin, English (Australian, UK, and US), French, German, Italian, Japanese (Kana, Kanji, and Romaji), Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish (European and Latin American), Swedish, and Ukrainian
Linguist FPS is an FPS that is fully played in your target language, with language that seems to be targeted to the vocabulary levels held by intermediate language learners. In other words, this game kind of just throws you into the deep end to immerse you in the language, rather than focusing on teaching you the language. I do not yet know enough Korean to truly play Linguist FPS, but I really look forward to being able to do so from the few minutes I’ve checked out.
Linguist FPS can be bought on Steam. Its regular price is $15, though as of this writing it’s on sale for just under $10.
Lost Abroad Cafe
Languages: Chinese (Mandarin), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish
Lost Abroad Cafe has you play as a barista in a country that speaks the language you’re trying to learn. It’s basically the frantic time management of Diner Dash mixed with language learning, and it’s pretty effective. I have personally played about an hour of Lost Abroad Cafe, and although it’s somewhat light on content it also feels like a game you could get a lot of mileage out of, especially as the developer continues updating it with more and more stuff. The current gameplay available is also weirdly relaxing (which lends itself to longer sessions) despite being stressful both in terms of time and learning a new language. I bought it on Steam even though it’s available for free on itch.io because they’re not asking for a lot, and because I have a lot of faith in the setup they have going.
You can find Lost Abroad Cafe on its itch.io page (from which you can play for free) and the main website (from which you can download it for free for either Android or iOS), and you can also buy it on Steam for its current regular price of $2.99, though the developers have said they plan to raise the price as they fill out the game with more content.
Noun Town Language Learning
Languages: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish
Noun Town Language Learning is a simple adventure game where you learn vocabulary by talking to people as well as interacting with things and saying their names out loud into your microphone. It’s very nice to look at, and it seems like it would be a nice place to spend a lot of time learning a language. Unfortunately, the voice recognition simply isn’t there yet from the little I’ve played, especially since the vast majority of the language learning seems to occur through the microphone/speech recognition. That said, there’s a demo, so you can just download the demo to see how nicely the game will play with your microphone. I still bought the full game because I have faith they’ll eventually upgrade the speech recognition, which is really the only thing holding the game back at this point.
Noun Town can be bought on Steam, and it also has a VR version on Steam; it’s possible that the VR voice recognition is better because of the VR hardware/headset. The regular price of each version is $19.99.
An upcoming (now released!) game: Newcomer
Languages: French, Italian, and Spanish
Finally, Newcomer looks like it’s gonna be a cool old-school style RPG focused on language learning, but it’s the only game on this list you can’t play at all yet (update: not true anymore!). I won’t be able to use it to learn Korean, as the only languages currently listed are French, Italian, and Spanish, but it’s definitely fully in the spirit of this list. Keep an eye out, and I’ll try to update this with release date info as well if I see anything.
Newcomer can currently be bought on Steam or bought on itch.io.
Other Options
Some other games I’ve run into but not tried myself include:
Kanji River 漢字の川 (Japanese (Kanji))
Lands of Languages (Bosnian, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Danish, English, German, Russian, Serbian, Turkish, Vietnamese)
Learn Kana The Fun Way! (Japanese (Kana))
Now you’re equipped to continue on your language learning journey while having a bit more fun. If you know of any other games that should be listed here, please let me know in the comments. Have fun and don’t give up!
