How many English words can you catch by ear?

A free listening game: you hear an English word and tap the picture that matches. No reading, no typing — just your ear. It draws on 299 everyday words and trains the gap between the English you can read and the English you can actually catch in speech.

It begins with a quick “how to play” card and a sound check — turn your phone volume up first.

Already confident? Try the harder 400-word game →

Reading a word and hearing it are two different skills. You can recognise water instantly in print and still miss it when a native speaker says it quickly. The game below never shows you the word — it only speaks it, and you answer by tapping a picture, so it works the same whether or not your first language uses the Latin alphabet. It currently draws on 299 words across 12 everyday categories — animals, food, people, places, things, the body, nature, numbers, feelings and more. Once you're comfortable here, the 400 Word Game covers sports, jobs, colours, emotions, fashion and music vocabulary at a harder level.

Why a word you "know" still slips past you

Frequency studies of spoken English — corpora such as the spoken section of the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English — keep landing on the same short list: roughly the 100 commonest words (the, and, to, you, I, a, of, it, in, is…) carry the bulk of ordinary conversation. The catch is that those words are spoken fastest and reduced hardest. A learner drilled on written flashcards can have a large vocabulary on paper and still stall on the easiest words spoken at speed.

The sounds that disappear

Real speech doesn't pronounce words one clean unit at a time. It links them: "What is it?" arrives as "Whadizzit?". It weakens them: to becomes "tuh", and becomes "'n". It contracts whole phrases — going to → "gonna", want to → "wanna", got to → "gotta", what are you → "whatcha". And it drops syllables outright: probably → "probly". None of this shows up in a written word list, which is exactly why ear training has to be separate from reading practice.

Easy mode, family profiles and a retry queue

Several features make this stick. Easy mode drops to two large pictures and a slow, steady voice; miss a word and a full-screen card shows the picture while the word repeats — errorless practice for an absolute beginner. Family profiles let up to four people each keep their own best streaks and missed-word list, saved on the device. The retry queue quietly collects the words you got wrong and slips them back in every few questions until you catch them. And the "hear it in a phrase" button plays the word inside a short sentence — "the cat sat down", "the fire engine is red" — with no penalty, because hearing a word in context is exactly how real listening works.

You choose the voices

The game starts on the clearest English voice your device has, so you can play straight away. If you want to change it, the 🔊 Voice button inside the game lists every real speech voice installed on your device — British, American, Australian, Canadian, male and female — each with a Test button. Tick the ones you like. With several ticked, the game shuffles them as you play and "Hear it again" steps through them, which trains your ear on more than one speaker; with one ticked it stays steady. The choice is saved on the device. Speaking speed isn't a separate control — it rises gently with your level, from slow and deliberate up to a natural pace.

How the game follows your ear

There is no win screen, because listening has no finish line. Instead the game tracks a level. Three correct answers in a row raises it; a miss lowers it. The level moves three things at once: the number of pictures (from three up to six), the automatic speaking speed, and how rare the spoken word is allowed to be. The result sits wherever your real listening level is and keeps nudging it. Ready for more? The 400 Word Game pushes up to eight choices at faster speed across harder vocabulary.

Practising beyond the game

Treat this as ear warm-up, not the whole workout. The methods that move listening fastest are shadowing (repeating a speaker immediately, out loud) and listen-first, check-after (no subtitles on the first pass). Ten to twenty minutes a day beats a long weekly session. Once you can catch a few hundred high-frequency spoken words reliably, move up to short conversations and real audio at 0.75x speed. Good free resources for that next step: BBC Learning English's "6 Minute English", ELLLO, Coffee Break English, and YouGlish for hearing a specific word inside real sentences.

A vocabulary list tells you how many words you've met. Only your ear knows how many you can still recognise when they go by at speed — and that number is the one worth growing.