A language learners’ forum

Chung wrote:The best example I've ever encountered is when a Couchsurfer who's also a tutor for German played a kids' version of Taboo in German (Tabu) with me and her boyfriend. The goal is to use circumlocutions for a word on a drawn card in the hope that your team member will guess the word within the allotted time. The circumlocutions or roundabout descriptions come about because you're not allowed to use "taboo" words in your description which would significantly help the other person guess correctly before the timer runs out.

This is brilliant! And very useful if you're doing language exchanges because you find yourself doing circumlocutions simply because you can't remember or don't know a word!

Recently, I have become rather addicted to buying "old but gold" language courses on ebay, such as Berlitz and Linguaphone. One great joy is that these courses avoid fads and gimmicks, and focus on teaching the language.

I was dismayed, then, to discover that even Linguaphone started polluting some of their courses (beginning in the late 1980s I believe) with futile "puzzles" such as crosswords, and circle-the-hidden-words.

I have no big issues with those types of exercises. I occasionally even tried to search them mostly for "light studying" because I enjoy some of them. One time I was looking for Wordsearch in japanese, I wanted to practise being able to spot words easily. For me they're just games that are familiar and enjoyed playing (still do).
On the other hand, if there's a type of exercise I end up avoiding like a plague is the "translate sentence to [TL]". When I was starting to learn japanese that was probably one reason I ended up not using Genki textbook (most of their exercises were "translate the following sentences into japanese"). With these exercises most of the textbooks just give one answer and I didn't want to get the idea that that was the only correct one. At least Minna no Nihongo (thankfully there wasn't a lot of those in the workbook/textbook) adds "(for) example - 例" before the answer.
All in all, I'm fine with and enjoy games - childish exercises once in a while when I'm learning.