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.
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