Remember Games For Learning Russian? I haven’t been hooked on a game since the $10 zombie farming game… until now. You guys, I can’t stop playing Hay Day. It’s soooo addictive!! Honestly, I’ve been spending at least 2 hours a day on that game for the past few weeks. Any time I see my phone, I pick it up and immediately check my farm. 😉

Being enslaved to an app is not a great thing, unless-

– that app also comes in Russian!

Not only does it come in Russian, but there are tons of Russian players in the game. This morning, I bought crops from колхоз, collective farm and пятилетка, 5 year plan.

From playing, I’ve picked up a ton of new words, words that are almost too random to learn in everyday life. For example, сахарный тростник, sugar cane and приманка, bait and кирка, mining pick. I guarantee you those words would just float away if I tried to learn them any other way. There’s serious variety to the game: raising livestock, producing goods, mining, expanding territory, trading, and fishing. (And ugh, the names of all those fish!!) It’s pretty slow going most of the time-I just managed to afford a вязальщик сетей, fishing net maker and hope to eventually get a медогонка, honey extractor- which means lots and lots and lots of repetition of all kinds of new words.

Here are the new words that I liked learning the most:

• курятник, chicken coop.
  • Similar endings: свинарник, pigsty and крольчатник, rabbit hatch. But cows and sheep get a пастбище, pasture.

• плавильня, smelter.
  • Turns different kinds of руда, ore into a слиток, ingot.
  • PS: Mining is always more fun with a бочка с тротилом, a barrel of TNT.

• амбар, barn.
  • Which is constantly running out of space so that you’ll pay real money to upgrade. Or you can be a scrooge like me and count every single шуруп and винт until you get enough to expand. And I totally thought шуруп and винт were the same thing- a screw– but nope. Especially clear when you are waiting and waiting for that final винт… and all you keep getting is a шуруп!

• дробилка, mill.
  • Very high-maintenance machine that slowly makes корм, animal food.

• купчая = land deed.
  • You’ll need a lot of these in order to расширь свою ферму, expand your farm.

Have I convinced you to try Hay Day in the name of language learning yet? 🙂 Or maybe you already play? (It’s been around for 5 years.) Hope to see you in the game!!