LeseSpaß (Reading Fun)
(a German reading game)
Lately my daughter has been intensely curious about reading. Over the weekend - while we were busy booking holiday stuff - she pulled out her box of 40+ books and quietly chewed through them, cover to cover. She can’t read yet, but she studies each page, “fake reads” out loud, and seems to grasp the gist. So we figured we might as well help her unlock the basics so she can squeeze even more joy out of reading.
I reused the structure and mechanics from the Cantonese game and built a new early-reading game focused on German. It’s designed for short, calm sessions on a laptop or an iPad - targeted, not busy. The goal: build phonological awareness, show how words fit together, strengthen sight-word recognition, and then bring it all together in tiny stories that feel like “real reading.”
What's inside
- Soundboard: Tap letters and common phonemes to hear crisp pronunciations—foundation work for phonological awareness.
- Word Lab: Build words from chunks (syllables/units) to see how German words come together; playful tinkering without pressure.
- Quiz: A sight-word recognition game in the familiar “mouse & cheese” format—fast feedback and lots of little wins (“Mama, I got cheese!”).
- Story Mode: Short, decodable mini-stories using only the basic word set, so she can experience a near-authentic reading moment.
It runs as a single HTML file on canvas with the Web Speech API for audio. Same calm vibe as before—perfect for a focused practice session together.
👉 Play it here: LeseSpaß (Reading Fun)
Details
- Estimated build time: ≈ 5–6 hours (more thinking, plus German word-variation kinks)
- Stack: vanilla HTML5 Canvas + Web Speech API; coded in Cursor with ChatGPT 5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro assisting
- Difficulty: Medium–High (handling variations and edge cases in German; a few TTS quirks)
