"Guess the flag", a minigame to practise languages

As I have mentioned before, I have been learning Malay for a bit.

After the initial bout of vocabulary harbouring, in order to practise a little bit, I started a little game of "Guess the flag" (with my Malaysian friend and Copilot) and later on I moved on to playing "Guess the animal".

Screenshot of my brief description, in broken Malay, of the Malaysian flag. Taken from the document where I put all the vocabulary I collect and all the practice I do.

The game is simple: taking turns, one person describes a flag, and the other player/s guess/es which one is it.

In this post I am going to drop some vocabulary so you can start playing "Guess the flag" straight away!

¡Adivina la bandera!

(Guess the flag)

Sheldon Cooper, from The Big Band Theory, presenting his vexillology channel "Fun with flags". I wonder if he'd have enjoyed learning languages like this.

The main vocabulary here is related to colour, position and some elements that appear sometimes in flags like moons, suns, stars, shields... and of course, country names!

Verbs

First, to talk about the elements a flag has, we are going to use the verb TENER (to have): tiene.

When we want to talk about how a flag is, we are going to use the verb SER (one of the ways we use for "to be"): es Since we are talking about flags, we are only going to be talking in the third person:

La bandera tiene...	The flag has...
Esta bandera tiene...	This flag has...
La bandera es...	The flag is...
Esta bandera es...	This flag is...

Nouns and adjectives.

Nouns are the words we use to name essentially everything, physical or abstract: moon, life, book, dog...

Adjectives are words that modify or give extra information about nouns: big, small, expensive, good...

There are two things I'd like to mention here:

Position: in Spanish, adjectives generally go after the noun. The usual element group is Article + Noun + Article (ANA, like the name), for example "un coche rojo". Gender and number agreement: unlike English, in Spanish, adjectives have to match gender and number with the noun they go with.

The red house --> La casa roja

The red cars --> Los coches rojos

If you want to see this in more depth, here are a couple of lessons by Lingolia (I love them!) explaining the Gender of nouns and Plural Nouns in Spanish. In the table below, adjectives marked with an asterisk (*) are gendered and they have to be adapted to the noun they go with.

POSICIONES	POSITIONS
horizontal	horizontal
vertical	vertical
diagonal	diagonal
en el centro	in the center
en el medio	in the middle
a la derecha	on the right
a la izquierda	on the left
arriba	on the top, up
abajo	on the bottom, down
COLORES	COLOURS
de color …	of a … colour
blanco*	white
amarillo*	yellow
naranja	orange
rojo*	red
morado*	purple
azul	blue
verde	green
negro*	black
ELEMENTOS	ELEMENTS
banda	band
línea	line
cruz	cross
escudo	shield
sol	sun
estrella	star
luna	moon
FORMAS	SHAPES
cuadrado	square
círculo	circle
triángulo	triangle
rectángulo	rectangle

The guessing part

Here I leave a little script with some possibilitie for the guessing tuns.

(In case it isn't clear, the parenthesis part is a placeholder, meant to be substituted with the actual name of the country.) Also, of course, here is a Wikipedia's list of country names in Spanish.

¿Es la bandera de (nombre del país)?	Is it the flag from (country’s name)?
¿La bandera de (nombre del país)?	The flag from (country’s name)?
¿Es (nombre del país)?	Is it (country’s name)?
¿(Nombre del país)?	(Country’s name)?
Sí	Yes
No	No

Practice time!

Can you guess the following flags?

1. ¡Adivina la bandera! Esta bandera es blanca y tiene un círculo rojo en el centro.
   

2. ¡Adivina la bandera!

   Esta bandera tiene dos bandas verticales azules a la izquierda y a la derecha, y en el centro tiene una banda amarilla con un tridente.

   
   

3. ¡Adivina la bandera!

   Esta bandera tiene líneas horizontales rojas y blancas. Arriba a la derecha tiene un rectángulo azul y una luna y una estrella amarillas.

   
   

4. ¡Adivina la bandera!

   Esta bandera tiene una línea negra arriba, una línea blanca en el centro y una línea verde abajo. A la izquierda tiene un triángulo rojo.

   
   

5. ¡Adivina la bandera!

   Esta bandera es blanca y tiene una cruz roja en el centro y cuatro cruces pequeñas arriba y abajo, a la derecha y a la izquierda.

   
   

I have also added a deck on Gizmo, so you can play on your phone or computer with more examples. You can find it here. If you missed my older post about it (when it was called Save All), it is free, AI-based and collects so little data it doesn't have cookies.

Screenshot from a gap exercise of "guess the flag" on Gizmo.

Guess anything!

Although guessing flags is perfect for early stages of learning, this format of game is very versatile and allows to put any themed vocabulary into practice.

You can play simpler and describe foods or animals, taking it up a notch and describe cities or plants... or just go into survival mode and describe illnesses or more specific biologic elements, like types of microbes.

The world is your oyster!