NYT's Connections and The Mini — for language mastery

In my previous article, Wordle — the game you should play everyday, I talked about the benefits of playing Wordle for word mastery and word logic.

For language mastery, Connections and The Mini, are two games I recommend to foreign speakers of English, English school students, and anyone wanting simply to stay language sharp.

Connections is a word association game, where given 16 words, the player must identify four groupings of associated words, ascending in difficulty, in only four guesses. The Mini, on the other hand, is a mini crossword. Unlike regular crosswords, this diminutive word teaser is not so long as to become frustrating, and can be solved for most people in one sitting. Clues usually consist of a mixture of word synonym suggestions, or cultural references, with the added twist that solves can also be phrases, such as ‘IMOKAY’.

In what follows, I will lay out some reasons why both Connections and The Mini can be good for language mastery, and a great fun tool for foreign learners of English as well.

Why I like word games

One of the reasons I love these kinds of word games is that I’ve never really been good at them. That sounds like a contradiction but bear with me.

At school I was always a slow learner when it came to spelling or anything like that. I was often frustrated and confused. I guess these days I would be labelled dyslexic. However, through much trial and error I gradually got better at spelling and writing. I’ve never been told I’m a good writer. Rather the opposite. I didn’t do well in writing or essays at school either. But when I fell in love with reading, I just got this stubborn idea in my head that I want to be good at writing. So I just practiced until I got better and better. Or at least until I could write something like this. I know I’m still not a great writer, but I’m happy that I got this far, and I enjoy being able to share my hardwon knowledge. Even now, whenever I write anything, I have to edit multiple times and proofread to weed out all of my mistakes or clumsy constructions.

However, I do believe by doing crosswords, like the Guardian quick crossword, the NYT crossword and The Mini, and words games like Wordle and Connections, I continue to improve my word and language mastery. These games were not avaiable when I was younger, so were not in my repertoire when I was trying to master English as a first language. As I say, I achieved that mostly through a lot of quality reading.

Rather, what I see now is that without these games, my English learners and students would have a much poorer mastery and grasp of the English language. This is one of the reasons I’m a big advocate of these games. All of my English learners from primary to high school level and adults play these games, and the discernible benefit is huge. Though it goes without saying that more than anything else, reading is also the main component of language mastery for my learners and students.

Connections — semantic gymnastics

The great thing about Connections is that it forces the players, and language learners, to think laterally about the semantics of words — that is, their meanings.

The game, broadly speaking, relies on identifying if a given word is intended as a verb, noun, or adjective, so this develops awareness and competency about parts of speech. So given the words ’TELL’, ‘REVEAL’, ‘LEAK’, ‘DISCLOSE’, we must ask ourselves, if these words are intended as verbs, nouns, or adjectives. In this case, only ‘LEAK, strictly speaking could be intended as both verb and noun, as in 'to leak' and ‘a leak’. But otherwise, we could safely make a guess that this is indeed one grouping of verbs by just voicing a 'to' before each word, while voicing an 'a', reveals that none of these words function as a noun.

So far so good. But things get a little tricky when we have words like ‘SLICK’, ‘SMOOTH’, ’STRAIGHTEN, ‘CURL’, forming one verb grouping referring to words concerning what can be done to hair, alongside ‘ADROIT’, ‘POLISHED’, ‘DEFT’, ’SKILFUL’, of adjectives referring to words concerning being good at doing something. In such cases, the words ‘SLICK’ and ‘SMOOTH’, could be intended as both verbs and adjectives, and to complicate matters further, if they were intended as adjectives, they would be semantically synonymous to words like ‘ADROIT’, ‘DEFT’, and ’SKILFUL’. So it would take an educated guess or two, to find the two groupings, depending of course on what the other groupings were.

This semantic gymnastics in Connections is a great exercise to get us thinking about words and their meanings much more laterally. It’s also a good way to get students to check dictionary entries to determine the form of the word being used, verb, noun, or adjective, and this leads to improvements in word mastery, through awareness of synonyms, antonyms, and semantic groupings.

Cultural references and ‘connections’

Another great thing about Connections is that it gets people thinking about different cultural references and connections. In language learning, building a strong working vocabulary can be strongly dependent on having a healthy and robust ability to make cultural references and connections. In cognitive linguisitcs we call this encyclopaedic knowledge and it's central to how linguistic semantics works. Nonetheless, this often provides vital contextual information to aid the memorisation of words and novel or unusual vocabulary.

Given a group like ‘ECONOMIST’, ‘OBSERVER’, ‘SPECTATOR’, ‘PROSPECT’, as a group referring to weekly political magazines, and  ‘WITNESS’, ‘ONLOOKER’, ‘BYSTANDER’, ‘RUBBERNECK’, as a group referring to people witnessing an accident, we are forced to be aware of cultural references, in this case we should have a good knowledge of current affairs, political, and literary magazine titles. Often in cases where you have semantically overlapping words, several guesses could be used out of confusion in looking for the right grouping.

Connections very often goes for unusual cultural references to create groupings. They’re usually American cultural references too, so this can be a bit trickier for British, or other English speaking, or foreign English speaking players, but on the other hand for English learners accustomed to British English, this is a welcome diversion to ensure a familiarity with American English, which is arguably more culturally pervasive these days.

The Mini - crossed words

I often find genuine crosswords a real challenge to do in one sitting. This is one of the reasons I like NYT’s The Mini so much. It’s short and sweet, and has a level of difficultly yet manageability that makes it rewardingly pleasurable. So for English learning students this is one of the best non-patronising crosswords out there.

The reason I claim this crossword is so great for language mastery for English learners is due to the wording of the clues. It’s neither completely puzzling, nor to blatant. Meaning that traditional crosswords can be very perplexing for foreign speakers of English, or simply patronising. The Mini gets this balance just right, making it challenging enough to make the experience educative. The clues force players to think about potential double-meanings of words, contextuality, and metaphorical usage. These are all elements of language that according to cognitive linguistic perspectives of language acquisition are fundamental to learning and acquisition.

What also works so well with The Mini, is that often it looks like it can be hard to get going, but often there’s a clue that most people will get. Once that goes, then the letters revealed will often allow at least one other clue’s solve to become a bit more obvious. Again, The Mini, at least to my mind, is designed in such a way that the setter’s get the balance just right, with clues and solves leading to gradual progression, neither too difficult nor too easy.

Particularly for English learners, the great thing about The Mini is that it gets them thinking about synonyms, popular cultural references, where young learners often out do me. There are periodically references to gaming, social media trends, or Reddit-like threads that go over my head, but my younger students are abundantly familiar with. There are also historical, or other cultural references, which serve as interesting talking points for stimulating in-lesson conversations.

A final clue

Overtime, consistently playing both Connections and The Mini, I see students get better and better at solving the games, and this also goes hand in hand with their improved language and word mastery.

Learners and players have a better instinct for synonyms, parts of speech, metaphorical usage, euphemism, and language references and connections.

So enjoy and encoruage your connecting and mini crosswording with your students, and witness your own language mastery improvement too.

…