Vocabulary builder: Vocab Word 4+

It makes sure you have mastered all of the essential and advanced words you need to know before going to the next level, Also, by challenging others you will automatically learn a lot.

This app shows promise, but suffers from its choice of a non-standard female narrator for pronunciation of the vocabulary items. I tried the first level, fruits, and found at least three words with the accent placed on the “wrong” (nonstandard dialect?) syllable:

Pomegranate
Grapefruit
Pineapple

Not as noticable but still disappointing to my ear: the clarity of the first-syllable accent in “lemon” vs that in “cherry.” Is the speaker just bored or what?

Of course, some (many?) users (or their parents) will find the pronunciation less of a focus than do I, who can’t recommend this app to students of English as a foreign language, where I think it might have a market if re-recorded.

But in that case it would also be advisable to automatically play the pronunciation of the new word on each page and have the spelling display only as an option button, to improve listening comprehension skills. That would be just the opposite of the app’s present design: spelling displayed automatically, pronunciation an option.

Finally, for a teaching tool the app is a lazy teacher. It’s more of a post-lesson quiz than an attempt to introduce new vocabulary items in an attention-holding way, even if the picture are superficially attractive. As such, it may appeal more to test-conscious parents than to their kids.

The app is great and could potentially be wonderful academically and within speech therapy. The pictures are gorgeous, when you set the app to just show two choices. When you set for 4 choices you can only see the top two images. When you set for 6 or 8 images/choices all of the pictures are shrunk in the vertical plane but not in the horizontal, resulting in very distorted images that are often unrecognizable. App needs some tech support.