Customer Reviews

Earobics Home Version Step 2: Sound Foundations for Reading and Spelling

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My 9 year old dyslexic son has been using this program for several months and it has been incredibly helpful with reading and writing. We hope to find the adolescent version and continue once he finishes this one.

This program and the other Earobics titles are clearly designed for North American users.

This is a shame because most of the activities work quite well.

However as a previous user mentioned - there are still af few glitches in there - thankfully not many.

What is more problematic is the English vs American accents.

Some of the differences are very frustrating for the kids, and leaves them stranded on the same level, unable to progress.

In the Fireman sounds game - the short vowels u and o sound almost identical.

For English speakers (UK, Australia, NZ, Sth Africa etc) these sounds are very different.
with the short 'u' sound clearly being pronounced 'uh' as in 'cup' or 'but'
and the short 'o' sound pronounced as 'o' as in 'cot' or 'orange'

However the Nth Amercian pronounciation of the short 'o' sounds very close to the 'u'/'uh', and comes out sounding somewhere between 'ah' and 'awe'.
So instead of 'cot' it sounds like 'c-ah-t' ... which is ok in the word recognition as there are the surrounding letters to help with the sound interpretation.
However in the individual short vowel sound recognition - it's quite hard and confusing for the kids, as it's clearly very different to what they learn in school English classes.

Similarly for the Pengiun game where there are sounds syllables given for words which are just confusing for the kids' spelling.
eg lemon ... instead of being sounded out as le-mon ... is sounded out as le-min
chicken ... instead of being sounded out as chi-cken ... is sounded out as chick-in
kitchen ... instead of being sounded out as kit-chen ... is sounded out as kit-chin

Finally the Hippo - find the mismatched sound in the sequence game, has very similar problems to the o/u issues above, along with r/l, with the kids getting stranded on a level unable to progress. At times, even as an adult who is well versed in accents - I cant hear the difference between the ruh/luh/rah/lah. The audio is also quite clipped short ... so this makes it even more difficult to determine what sound is being said.

Summary:
The Pirate/Parrot word/syllable matching games and the Luck Duck sound/syllable/word recognition games dont seem to suffer from these issues.

The beginner & intermediate levels of the Fireman sound recognition game are also good. With the English/American accent confusions only arising in the advanced level games.

Apart from the pronounciation issues - the Penguin game works well too.

Probably the most frustrating one is the Hippo game as the kids can easily get stuck on each of 8 the beginner tasks without progressing at all. Any background noise can make it impossible to hear the subtle sound differences, which are not familiar to non-American accent speakers.

***
The games are repetitive by nature, so can become a bit boring. So offer some kind of incentives to get them thru it. We did the program over the school spring break - getting thru all the beginner & intermediate levels within 2 weeks, except the Hippo, which I'm considering abandonning if the higher levels' audio isnt clearer as it's too frustrating.

Think I need to contact the manufacturer. The games are inventive and can hold my 8 year old's attention. But one of the games (the one with the firefly) seems to have a glitch. Even when the correct sequence is selected, the software indicates that it's wrong - it's very frustrating for my son and so defeats the whole purpose of the software.