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| From: UBI Soft
Category: Video Games
List Price: $19.99
Buy New: $10.98
You Save: $9.01 (45%)
New (33) Used (7) from $10.98
Avg. Customer Rating:  75 reviews
Sales Rank: 286
Platform: Nintendo Ds
ESRB: Everyone
Media: Video Game
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Operating System: Nintendo DS
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 5.4 x 4.9 x 0.7
MPN: 16342
UPC: 008888163428
EAN: 0008888163428
ASIN: B000ME25P2
Release Date: November 6, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 21-25 of 25 | | « PREV | | |
Good educational game for kids January 23, 2008
0 out of 7 found this review helpful
Although "My Word Coach" is not the kind of game most kids would appreciate receiving as a gift, as educational games go it is a pretty fun one.
Pro:
- Lots of mini-games, which are used for training but are also fun.
- Players are given a choice of four coaches; the "personalities" differ enough that it should be easy for anyone to find a good one.
- Crisp, clean graphical look.
Con:
- The game's initial player screening is not very precise. I'm a college graduate with a large vocabulary, and I got 100% correct on the minigames the program gave me to determine my starting placement. It still put me at 20%, "primary school graduate." I have to wonder what it would have called me if I hadn't gotten 100%!
- The handwriting recognition is not perfect; the program has repeatedly confused my "D" for an "M" (and I have very clear handwriting).
- As a result of the first "con" above, I find the game too easy. The words it is giving me include things like "juxtapose," "jurisdiction," and "overawe" -- there hasn't been a single unfamiliar word so far.
I'm sure the game will give me increasingly difficult words, and that if I stuck with it for a few weeks I would start learning new words from it; but I don't know if I have the patience to keep playing until I get to that point.
Overall, this would be a good game for children, if they would play it. It's probably too basic to be of much use to adults who already have good vocabularies and are interested in improving them.
 Not for people who are serious about actually learning the words January 18, 2008
35 out of 54 found this review helpful
I don't know if I've ever seen any game come down in price this much this quickly. Maybe it's because no one wants to keep it for very long!
At first, I thought this game was great. After playing it almost every day for about 5 weeks, I have a very different view.
Pros-
Most of the games are actually fun at first. You'll probably learn some words and their spelling. Easy to pick up.
Now for the much longer list of cons-
This game does a terrible job of gauging your current level. It asks you far too few words, almost all of which are highly advanced, and placed both my friend and I FAR lower than it should have. There's nothing you can do about that. I'm 24 years old, and after 5 weeks of updating my expression potential to 34%, I'm still seeing words like kettle, jaguar, squirt, traumatic, solitary, airfield, canine, rephrase, acoustic, receptive, sparrow, nutrition, slang, stumbling, optimism, and so forth. I would say 80% of the words I've seen on here are elementary school level, while the other 20% are middle-school level. I have not "learned" a single word that I would consider calling high-school level.
You'll learn very little for the time you spend playing. Of the few words that were new to me, hardly any of them were repeated more than a few times, often in the same day. You are bombarded with far too many words over time, when it should just be reinforcing groups of words before moving on to more. Also, the only time you actually learn anything is when you read through the definitions after each game. There's nothing at all to be learned by playing the games. It teaches you like a dictionary does. But the worst part is that there is no context or pronunciation! After playing for long enough, you will eventually unlock a game that doesn't count toward your EP, but does have recordings of the words being spoken as well as context examples. However, you can only access these one random word at a time. You are given very little time to read the examples. This means that pronunciation and context are on the game, but you can't look them up or access them at all while supposedly updating your potential to express yourself with words you don't necessarily understand.
The definitions are often VERY weak. The part of speech (verb, noun...) is not given at all. If a definition is too long then it simply cuts off rather than allowing you to scroll down to read the whole thing. Many words appear in their own definition, which is never acceptable. Words with multiple definitions will only have one of them provided. Some definitions couldn't possibly be more wrong: inflammable is defined as, "Things that burn very easily." First of all, inflammable is an adjective and the definition is given for a plural noun. Also, while it is technically true, it has been a VERY long time since vernacular changed to avoid confusion, and even my dictionary suggests that you not use the word like this.
The simple little games become mundane very quickly. You would have to play this game for several months to really get that much out of it, but it will get very boring long before that. Most of what your coach says to you is hardly better than mindless dribble. The graphics are quite simple and the music is extremely limited and dull. One day it randomly told me that the word of the week is minstrel. Apparently the word of the week means a word you won't be learning, because it never gave me the definition or even put it in any of the games. It's not that uncommon for it to tell me that my EP has been updated when in fact it is exactly the same.
Ultimately, the developers were too lazy to provide the necessary elements for learning a new word, make it accurately gauge your personal level, come up with enough games to keep it interesting for a long time; they didn't even make sure they got the definitions right! They started with a great idea, and released a product that falls unforgivably short of its potential.
improving your vocabulary January 18, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am really enjoying this game card and learning a lot of new words. The only drawback is that these are words from the England dictionary and not an American/United States dictionary. I would like a game card that used the American dictionary. Also, it would be helpful if it included a verbal pronounciation on the card. But is neat to learn English words from England. It shows the differences in our languages.
GREAT for All Ages January 18, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Here's one of the few learning games out on the market. It also has a built in dictionary (a good one at that) where you can look up words (and naturally spelling) if you don't have a dictionary around the house.
The game allows you to save tabs of scores for the players.
This is great if you have kids in middle school up to high school or even college. Give a challenge "hey let see how good your spelling is" and sit back and play. Much better than verbally reading out loud words to spell. We all know video games are the "in thing" these days, and what better a way to use it as a tool for learning and improving vocabulary and spelling?
 No Results (Yet?) January 17, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Word Coach is one of those "brain" titles for the Nintendo DS. The recent trend with interactive gaming systems seems to be overwhelmingly "how to improve your brain."
The purpose of Word Coach is to build one's vocabulary. They do this by playing simple games like fill-in-the-missing-letter and spelling a word quickly. The program charts your progress, and you are required to do a minimum amount each day and reach a certain goal before unlocking the next level.
The recommendation is to do small amounts of this on a daily basis, rather than sitting down and unlocking a whole group of levels all at one time.
The interface is simple and clean, though I did have a hard time getting the program to recognize whenever I was drawing a G or a Q.
After playing this for a while, unfortunately I haven't detected any improvement in my vocabulary usage.
It's a nice game, but it's not very fun and exciting, but it's a nice, "brainy" way to pass time.
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