Proverbs

Proverbs is a quick "complete the saying" game. A well-known proverb appears in your language with one word blanked out · you pick the word that finishes it from a short list of options. "Don't cry over spilled ___" · milk. "Better late than ___" · never. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the ___" · bush. After each pick the full saying is shown.

Native sayings, not translations. Each locale plays its own well-known proverbs, not literal translations from English. The Swedish version asks for "Gråt inte över spilld ___", the German for "Es ist nicht alles ___, was glänzt", the French for "Qui se ressemble s'___", and so on. That matters because proverbs encode each culture's habits of thought · translating "the early bird gets the worm" word-for-word into another language usually produces something nobody actually says.

Distractors stay in register. Harder rounds add more answer options · three to six. The wrong options are real words pulled from the other proverbs in the pool, so the distractors read as plausible saying-words rather than random nouns. You can't eliminate by surface oddness · you have to know the saying.

Why proverbs are worth learning. They're cultural shortcuts. Knowing the proverbs of a language lets you understand allusions in news, jokes, and everyday conversation that otherwise pass you by · "the cobbler's children" reference, the "stone-skipping" idiom, the agricultural metaphors that survive in industrial-era languages. The pool starts with the most universal sayings (the ones shared across cultures) and grows toward more locale-specific ones.

Part of the PlayMemorize family of brain-training games. Runs entirely in your browser, works offline as a Progressive Web App.