Language games

To make your language studies fun there are various games you could play with them. One possibility is to pretend you’re foreign and don’t speak your native language. You could speak on your phone or with friends in the foreign language near to people who speak your native language, while listening to what those people are saying. If they makes comments about you assuming that you won’t understand them, you could surprise them by switching languages. This is a kind of ‘garden pathing’, which involves leading people to expect one thing, then giving them something else, is often used in jokes.

Another possibility is to recreate Monty Python’s Hungarian phrasebook sketch, or at least to use elements from it. The sketch involves a Hungarian bloke using a badly translated Hungarian-English phrasebook to ask for things in a tobacconist with phrases like “my hovercraft is full of eels”. You could use strange phrases like that in a shop appearing to get them from a phrasebook, or actually use random, unrelated phrases from the phrasebook. Then later on you could go back to the same place and talk normally. If the shop keeper is surprised, you could pretend that nothing is out of the ordinary, or explain that your phrasebook is faulty.