Others say...

"An excellent tool for eleven year old son"
I bought this game for my eleven year old son. He is bilingual in Spanish and English and I had hoped this would help him to improve English vocabulary and spelling skills. Although it is hard for My Word Coach to compete with his "fun only and non-educational" type DS games, he does actually find it to be be fun and challenging. He likes the fact that he is graded (given a "level") and must compete with himself to raise the level. Now, I just need to work on getting him to play 20 minutes daily! I am looking forward to a future "My German Coach" as he will begin German as his third language in school this fall!

"Keeping my brain busy"
I work for a security company, and I often find myself in the middle of nowhere with nothing to look at and nobody to talk to. This makes falling asleep a serious risk, as in a risk to my employment and potentially a risk to the people and property I'm protecting. How do I avoid this problem? Playing games like My Word Coach

I found the games to be both fun and educational. I've already ordered My French Coach and My Spanish Coach. I do security once in a while for a Canadian cargo ship, and with all the illegal aliens, Spanish is becoming necessary to speak to people I encounter during my night shifts.


"Not nearly as fun as I had hoped...."
Okay, I thought that MyWord Coach would be a good way to learn some new words... it wasn't, at least for me. (Although I do read a lot.) Here are my complaints-

1. The game seems to have been prepared for the British market; there are quite a few British words in here that aren't really used in American English. For example, I have had "flypast" instead of "flyby", etc. There are more, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.

2. The game does not have good, complete definitions for many of the words. For many of the words with multiple or more complex definitions, the definition expresses only a small part of what the word can mean.

3. There are far too many short/slangy/common words in here. For example: woozy, snazzy, watermill, porker, ninja, freeloader, etc. Now, it might seem a little odd that I'm complaining about this; however, I thought that since words take up little space as text files the game would probably contain many more difficult/advanced words. Also, my level on the game is pretty high, but these low-level words keep appearing.

4. The games get really boring.

5. There is no pronunciation key, nor audio of the words.

I guess I'm just a little disappointed; when I read about the advanced methods they used and the fact that they worked with the Cambridge dictionary, I just expected quite a bit more.



"Fun!"
Hey, for $10, I'm having a blast with this "game". It's a nice addition to my growing set of "anti-aging" video games to keep my brain in gear. I use it almost every day and every now and then a new game is unlocked. Some of them I really like. Others are a little harder to figure out at first (heck, who REALLY reads the directions?), but eventually I get it.

"The Word is Deplorable"
Producers of games premised on the enlightened arm of self-improvement, such as My Word Coach, are faced with baleful prospects from their work's incipience. First, they must overstep their otherwise stale chosen field with amusing sub-games to create a panorama of options to suit the players fancy at any given time: the player's willpower alone is insufficient to fund the puritan regiment. You won't find this in Word Coach, a game that specializes in eroding the willingness of even the most patient and forgiving gamers. Like other intelligence-raising games, the game begins with a paucity of sub-games to engage; in the case of Word Coach, two menial games are initially proffered: Missing Letter and Split Decision. Missing Letter takes "patented" advantage of the system's stylus, presenting the player with a word with the eponymous missing letter for him to write capitalized in the space below. Yes, that's all. Oftentimes the letter is not even one of especial difficulty, requesting the player to guess what letter is followed after -NG at the end of a word. Split Decision is an equally inane source of boredom. A poorly constructed definition is supplied on the upper screen and the answer is behind one of two opposing arrows. Sadly, there is not even a fifty-fifty chance of answering the question correctly, but a 100% one since the wrong definition is frequently egregiously inaccurate in any context. After completing either of these games the player is offered the chance to review his set of words met in each game accompanied by the same remarkably unmemorable definition.

The player is awarded with differently styled games not through his performance, but by his daily tenacity and persistence to withstand the Sisyphus labors. I could only stand to play enough to earn two others: Pasta Letters and Block Letters. As asinine as it sounds, one is to spell out a word with quickly sinking alphabet letters drowning in what appears to be a sea of expired canned tomato soup. The only way to cause them to resurface is to blow into the microphone--a task that will undoubtedly make you light-headed if not utterly swoon, for the letters disappear at an astounding rate. Block Letters is worse than vomiting up that endless bowl of tomato soup in Pasta Letters if you were hungry for more ways to dull your mind. This time, one is to spell out words from letters that fall with prodigious slowness with no way to alter the speed. Both are utterly uneventful.

Besides the uncreative and atrophied style, your "coach" has as little character and enthusiasm as the games themselves, serving absolutely no purpose. "And while were at inserting a useless role," said the producers of My Word Coach," why don't we make four others fill it and give them all stereotypical appearances and names of the ethnicity rainbow while softening our racial vision with enough political correctness to avoid angering anybody?" White man and former Breakfast Club tyrant Alastair Archibald, pant-suited feminist and iron-boxed businesswoman Veronica Munroe, afro'ed brotha from da hood brought out to inspire intercity youths Lucius King, and under-nourished, pretentious good-Brit Penny, are all at your service--and are really all the same under-developed person. They all have that same unchanging and featureless face shared by the poor fool who would attempt to raise his vocabulary for the SAT or GRE with this ponderous gourd of a game assigned with an uninspiring and tedious music score most likely written on a gas station's bathroom's used toilet paper roll by a fired construction worker and wife beater.

Don't buy this game. Read literature, write down words you don't know, look them up, and practice with them with notecards and filling in sentences.