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Happy New Year! Are you looking for ways to practice your target language without, you know, actually sitting down to study? This week’s app, like Trivia Crack a few weeks ago, is a language lesson in disguise. As a bonus, you probably already have it.

Word Bubbles starts you out on really easy word searches, just a few letters long and only one word needed. Then the words get longer, or you get more words to find. And yes, you can only use the letters once, and the letters all must connect in a string.

The sounds and interactions–chirpy chimes, popping bubbles–are pleasant. There’s no negative consequences for getting words wrong, so you can experiment until you succeed. That said, you can move yourself into a corner when multiple ways to make the same word exist:

It’s a cute, enjoyable timewaster of a game. And it can indeed help you learn your target language!

As native (or at least proficient) readers of English, you don’t just sound out every single word you come across. You have some words memorized by sight, and others that you know how to decode using parts of the words. (Your brain also lets you skip over less important words like prepositions.) Same thing when it comes to spelling: either you memorized it at some point, or you can use your knowledge to make a best guess. Then when you come across words that are ambiguously written or spoken, you can figure it out.

Unless you have an incredibly large vocabulary, Word Bubbles will eventually expect you to find a word that you don’t already know. But your target language probably follows some spelling conventions, so you can let those conventions–and the layout of the board–guide your experiments. By forcing you to use your understanding of how words are built, Word Bubbles gets you to practice the orthographic and morphological skills that make a strong reader and writer.

As word games go, Word Bubbles isn’t as revolutionary or different as it claims to be. It’s moderately entertaining, and being able to play it in multiple languages is a nice plus, making it worth the download.

Name: Word Bubbles 
Platform: iOS, Google Play, Amazon Fire
Price: free
Languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish (the company, Apprope, is based in Stockholm, hence the Scandinavian languages)
Language Level: Speech Emergence (III from that link), mostly to give you some degree of footing