Vocab Cannon Game

Crates drift down on parachutes, and each one carries a word in the language you are learning. One launcher stands below, over six chambers that each hold a rocket and an English meaning. Press the meaning of the word you are aiming at, and its rocket is loaded and fired. Every word comes with a keyword cue, a small picture built on what the word sounds like, so a miss turns into a memory.

How to play

1. Choose a language: Spanish, German, Japanese, Modern Greek, Modern Hebrew or Mandarin Chinese.
2. Each wave opens with a study card of six words. It shows each word, its meaning and its keyword cue. Take as long as you like, then press GO.
3. The crates start to fall 1.5 seconds later. The lowest crate is the target, with a ring round it. Tap another crate to aim at it instead.
4. Under the launcher are six chambers, each with a meaning. Tap the meaning of the target's word. Its rocket is loaded and fired, and the right one pops the crate.
5. A wrong meaning fizzles. The crate drops a step, that chamber jams for a moment and says Jammed, and the word's meaning and its keyword cue show on the playfield.

A wave has more crates than meanings, 7 in the first wave and up to 12 later, so a word falls more than once and no meaning can be ruled out. A crate takes 18 seconds to reach the ground in the first wave and a little less in each wave after it, down to 9 seconds. Words you got wrong, or that landed, come back in a later wave with the meanings in new places.

You have three lives, and a crate that reaches the ground costs one. On a keyboard, press Enter or G for GO, 1 to 6 for the chambers as they are numbered, and the left and right arrows to change the target. Escape or Space pauses.

Scoring

The sooner you know the meaning, the more a crate is worth.

• A crate popped with no wrong shot scores 100, plus up to 100 more for how high it still is.
• A crate popped after a wrong shot showed its meaning scores 20.
• A wave with no wrong shot and no landing adds 250.

Your five best scores for each language are saved in this browser, with the wave each game reached. In practice, a crate that lands costs no life, so the game goes on until you end it from the pause screen. Practice games are not saved.

What the keyword method is

The keyword method is a way to learn a foreign word in two steps. First find a word or phrase in your own language that sounds like it. That is the keyword. Then picture the keyword and the meaning together in one scene. The Spanish word pato means duck and sounds like pot, so you picture a duck sitting in a cooking pot. When you meet pato again, the sound brings back the pot, and the pot brings back the duck.

The cues in the game are only a start. A picture you make up yourself usually sticks better than one you are given, so change any cue that does not work for you. Our guide to memorizing vocabulary words shows how to build these pictures, and the tutorial on mnemonic images has more ways to make them vivid.

Which words are in the game

Each language has 30 common nouns for things you can picture, such as animals, food and things around the house. Every word has one plain English meaning. Nouns are shown without their articles.

• Japanese words are written in kana, with romaji under them. There is no kanji.
• Chinese words are Mandarin, written in simplified characters, with pinyin and its tone marks under them. A syllable with no mark has the neutral tone.
• Greek and Hebrew words are written in their own letters, with the word in Latin letters under them. Hebrew reads from right to left.

Want another language or more words? Tell us which languages you are learning on the language learning page.

Try our other free memory games, such as Capital Cannon for the world's capital cities or Poem Climber for learning a poem by heart.