My Word Coach DS Review

I bought this the other day for DS. It's pretty cool as far as that whole "brain training" genre goes. This one is focused on building your vocabulary and to some extent, it works. I'm learning new words everyday.

The game runs very much like Brain Training. The idea is that you play a few games every day and it measures your competance at the games in some sort of scale where you can try and reach the top. It fails on a few levels.

Firstly, there way of helping you to learn these new words is by telling you what their definition is. The problem is that Dictionary definitions are often hard to grasp. What they need to do is put the words in some sort of context too. This would certainly help get the gist of how to use the word rather than just knowing what it means. When I was growing up, hell, even now, I use words in the wrong way or the wrong context because I "kind-of" know what it means but don't quite get it right or say it in the wrong way. This is a process of learning. It's only after someone picks you up on this, corrects you, that you learn what's really going on.

Another problem is that the character recognition is a bit off. The way I do an E is apparently not accepted. There were similar, but not as frequent, problems on Brain Training. The good thing is that it gives you ample time to correct it if it gets it wrong. Some of the games aren't as smooth or as well designed as Brain Training and this is something that is quite important to get right. The games in Brain Training were not the best of fun but they suited a purpose whereas there are times with the Word Coach that you wonder why you are doing this. There are no games that require much speed as they all involve reading definitions of words; this is not necessarily a bad thing but I often feel like I should be doing the games at speed when that sometimes works against me.

All in all, it's not a bad game and I hope it fits the purpose of teaching me new words and improving my speaking and writing but I feel like if this game were actually made by the same developers as Brain Training, it would be better.

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