Language Learning as a Game: The Case of "Where Are Your Keys?"

A friend and aspiring polyglot once invited me to play a language learning game called “Where Are Your Keys?” (WAYK). The game has a few simple rules: all players are allowed to only speak in the language they are trying to learn, a native or experienced teacher moderates through a number of ASL signs, and the rest of the players are taught how to say, “What is this?” in the given language, so that they construct their linguistic sense with this simple phrase. Thus the game created a self-contained environment where the players could immerse in the language they are learning.

This setup was vastly different from the classroom setting I’m used to, where language learning took shape through memorization of words, phrases, and rules. Now that I’m taking an introductory Japanese course along with this linguistics class, I’ve been noticing how the concepts talked about in class come to use in our learning of a new language. Moreover, it has allowed me to think about and articulate on the linguistic processes that occur in this game.

Having “What is this?” as the only available tool, one needs to engineer creative ways of making the fluent speaker provide useful information about the language. For example, the most elementary information one can pull from the experienced speaker includes the syntax of the expression “This is [name of object]” and what words to use to convey it. From there one can point to a small collection of said objects to figure out the morphology of plural nouns and pronouns, or maybe discover that both expressions are exactly the same. As I used this format to learn Romanian, I looked for patterns of speech, slowly constructed my own interpretation of its grammar, and corrected it as I acquired more knowledge, much alike the process of natural language acquisition.

To be fair, part of why WAYK worked for learning Romanian is because it is a romance language like Spanish, my native language. It was easy to perceive the phonetic and syntactic similarities: the Romanian expression for “What is this?” /ʧe.əs.ta/ was one of many phrases that resembled its Spanish counterpart /ke.es.esto/. With such cues I was able to build a grammar based on one that I already knew, which made learning Romanian that much easier. However, it would have been more difficult to learn non-romance languages that have little syntactic or phonetic similarities to those I know.

In these cases the classroom provides a space where teachers can guide their students as they explore an entirely new set of linguistic possibilities. The Japanese class I’m currently taking started with Japan’s two alphabets and general greeting expressions, and from there we built on our linguistic sense of Japanese through practice of vocabulary and sentence structure. This is not to say that we could not have gained the same knowledge through immersion or WAYK, but that my teachers’ summarization of the inner linguistic workings of Japanese saved us a lot of time in trying to decode it.

It is hard to say to what extent the WAYK game could be used to learn a language: after a certain point, concepts can become so abstract that direct instruction would be necessary to continue learning the subject. Nonetheless, WAYK can be helpful in having players gain an intuition in how language acquisition works, and allows them to take an active role in building a solid understanding of a language’s inner workings. Not only does this facilitate further learning of the language, but it’s also a really fun time.