Crucigramas

Our local newspaper on its comic page prints four of the New York Times crossword puzzles each week. Lately I’ve been enjoying trying to do these, a good pastime while at the kitchen table. Sometimes I succeed in completing them, sometimes not. I’ve been musing about how hard it would be to do a New York Times-level crossword puzzle in a language I’m learning, let’s say Spanish. If nothing else, these crossword puzzles rely on a high level of cultural knowledge.

Happily, I just found a source of crossword puzzles for language learners. I was looking for a platform to provide verb conjugation exercises and came across Linguno which has a variety of exercises in five different languages. One of these is crossword puzzles at a number of levels of difficulty. I’ve been doing the A2 and B1 level puzzles in Spanish. It’s a lot of fun and a good way to develop vocabulary. I showed these to Pica and she’s trying out the puzzles in German. Tonight she shared a puzzle with her German conversation group and the activity was a hit!