As a beginner, understanding the language is nearly impossible—which makes it hard to focus. That's why we play the Noticing Game! Instead of aiming to understand, your goal is simply to notice things: full words, interesting sounds, repeated phrases—anything that stands out.
Parent Skills:
As a beginner, understanding the language is nearly impossible—which makes it hard to focus. That's why we play the Noticing Game! Instead of aiming to understand, your goal is simply to notice things: full words, interesting sounds, repeated phrases—anything that stands out.
Train your brain to focus on the language
Strengthen things you learn from priming
More fun than not understanding
The Noticing Game is a technique you can use as a beginner (or intermediate) when you aren't able to understand content in the target language. Instead of trying to understand the content, as you would do in a language you're good at, you're just trying to notice things. Anything! This helps you stay focused on the content and learn from it, rather than getting bored or frustrated.
As a beginner, the Noticing Game is critical to being able to immerse in content. When you only know a few hundred words, how are you supposed to actually understand anything? But as you start to learn more words, you should rely on the Noticing Game less and less, and start doing interactive immersion.
The biggest issue learners face is that the Noticing Game feels weird to do. Most adults are used to understanding everything they come across. This discomfort is why the Noticing Game is so important. It helps you stay focused on the language, so that you can learn, even when you understand so little.
To actually "play," all you need to do is focus on finding things! The easiest thing to notice are words you've been learning. Other things to notice might be recurring grammar patterns (maybe many words end in the same few letters, or people end sentences with a specific word), or words that look very similar to something you know in another language (cognates).
Anything can be noticed. If you find your focus wandering, that's normal. Just remind yourself that you should be noticing things and continue with the content.
The Noticing Game can be played with any kind of content. You don't need any special materials, but if you find it helpful, you can use a list of words to give you things to look for. You can take a list of words you learned in Vocab Study, make yourself a little Bingo Card with the words or any sort of tool to help you notice things.
When you feel like you're able to do the Noticing Game and want to level up, check out the Noticing Game with Confirmation.
Bingo cards
Wordlists