Games to Learn English

This site is intended for students of English as a foreign language as a resource to study or review language.  All the content is made with flash and is freely available to be downloaded and reused in any way.  You can see the download page here just click on any of the links and a 'rar' file will start to download.

My name is Owen and I work now as an ESL teacher near Xian China having spent the previous 9 months in Inner Mongolia.  I worked previously as a flash developer/web designer as well as numerous other short time jobs.

I've also worked teaching English in Thailand and Vietnam, although I think China is really the best place to work right now and the Chinese people generally know how to have fun.

This site is more of a hobby than anything else, I like to make games in my free time or days off. Although I also like to travel and eat donuts too.

I use the really straight forward Joomla platform for the site. All the additional functions like translations, user comments and ratings are just pre-made Joomla modules that I uploaded and activated. The theme is a modified version of the default ja_purity theme that comes bundled with the installation. I would definitely recommend Joomla or probably word press too as a easy way to make a simple site.

The hosting company I use is called Hostclear who are cheap and reliable.  They also have 'fantastico' on their servers so that installing Joomla, Drupal or most other platforms only takes one click.  Also I use Cloudflare a free service that prevents malicious attacks and reduces bandwidth usage.

All the game content is made using flash cs3 and mostly using vector based images and sounds recorded from friends of mine. The first few games I made, that you can still see on the back page, were of quite poor quality and there is quite a clear improvement over time. The most recent games all follow an MVC framework and use a lot of Tweenlight.

With the rising popularity of the iPad and iPhone (the flash games on this site won't work on those devices) flash is becoming less and less of a useful too.  However for the time being at least I still think it's the best option for sites such as this and will continue to make games in flash.  Maybe in the future I'll learn HTML 5, especially if there is a good IDE.  Pretty much every other site I can find for online English seems to use flash too anyway.

If you have any questions about flash games, about teaching English in China/South East Asia or even help finding a job, you can send me an email here.