Wordfeud – a new way of practicing Swedish Posted by jennie on Oct 19, 2011 in Culture, Uncategorized, Vocabulary
Have you been bitten by the Wordfeud-bug yet? Well, if you haven’t and you have no intention to be bitten by it either, I strongly advice you to stop reading now. Wordfeud is highly addictive and might harm your relationships- unless your family, friends and partner are addicts too, that is. But Wordfeud can also – as I have discovered recently – be an excellent tool for improving one’s vocabulary.
Some fact first of all:
Wordfeud is a Scrabble-style app-game for Androids and iOS platforms. It was created “for fun” by the 28 year old Norweigan Håkon Bertheussen and 24 hours after it was released, over 10 000 people had downloaded the word game – without it being marketed at all. Today, millions of people worldwide use Wordfeud and you can play in either English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian or Danish. The game has a 15-by-15 tile gameboard, a letter tile set and the same scoring mechanism as Scrabble, and you start a new game by either inviting a friend or searching for a random opponent. Each player can have up to 30 games going at once, and has up to 72 hours to make a move before forfeiting the game. The game is free, but there is a premium version as well that costs money.
And boy do the Swede love it! The Wordfeud fever has spread with an increible pace over Sweden and as of today, around 500 000 Swedes play the game. 500 000! In other words, there are plenty of opportunities for Swedish language students (who own an adroid…) across the globe to practice and expand their vocabulary. I have learnt loads of new words in English since I started playing agains native English speakers – some more useful than others – and I’ve made a silly but rather practical point of writing them all down. And the best thing, I can justify my playing by claiming that I am, after all, studying.
So, anyone up for a game?
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Comments:
kimspindel:
Yay! One could also play Betapet too 🙂 It’s basically the same thing, and you can play it in browser 😀
Alex:
What sort of words did you learn in English??
jennie:
Ha ha, ROLLMOPS are one. The rest might not be suitable for publishing 🙂
Jan:
Rye, goat, tan ? Svenska ?
Martin Johansson:
There is a new great cheat app for Wordfeud on android market! It is called Wordfeud Mastermind and I don’t have to input any letters or bonus tiles because it does everything automatically. I have not lost a single game when I have used that app. 🙂 It can hardly be compared to the other bad cheats. Must be seen! https://market.android.com/details?id=se.ballefjongberga.wfmm
David:
There’s been a big debate in Sweden about Wordfeud, since people have been dissatisfied with the list of words and the rules. Many people consider the only acceptable wordlist for these kinds of games to be the Swedish Academy Glossar (Svenska Akademiens ordlista, SAOL, http://www.svenskaakademien.se/ordlista), and apparently WF is now going to be based on it. Another thing that annoys many is that WF apparently permits inflected words (like “arbetar” = ‘works’), while the Scrabble version that Swedes are used to playing (as well as other word-based games and puzzles such as Svenska Dagbladet’s “Nian”, similar to “Polyword” in the Daily Telegraph) only accept the uninflected form of a word (in this case “arbeta” = ‘to work’). IIRC this is different from the English version of Scrabble.
Darla Vonseeger:
great share was good read