This page features various interactional games that you can use for learning how to compliment in English, Korean, and Japanese! Additionally, these games can be adapted for teaching other speech acts in the classroom, or at home.
Praise is a Japanese game where players are given a card with a compliment, and players must decide whether the compliment is genuine or not. This game has recently been translated to English, as well. This game would be a great game when assessing for pragmatic development and practicing noticing genuine and non-genuine compliments in Japanese or English. This card game is currently not rated for an age group yet.
Tasty Love is a Korean game that is a dating simulator. The game takes place during the Covid-19 pandemic where the main character, played by you, receives multiple suitors but she only talks to them online. This game utilizes digital conversations and a real life event that the majority of people went through to create a fun an engaging game. In this game, the text can either be in Korean or English. Compliments occur during the texts with the main character and their suitors. Teachers can also use this game to have students generate compliments for the characters and how they handle living during a pandemic.
Covet Fashion is a mobile game where you create outfits for a character that is appropriate for a specific occasion or situation. After you have completed the level, you get to see the outfits that other individuals have created and vote as to which outfit you preferred or was more appropriate for the situation. This mobile game could be used as an exercise for giving compliments. When students are voting on outfits, this gives the teacher an opportunity to have students practice creating compliments using the characters from the game. The teacher can, also, elicit reasoning from the students and why they created the compliment and choose specific vocabulary or a specific structure based on the character and the context.