Review 208

Most people are very happy with the documentation, especially the instructions for setting up your first project. The instructions for uploading data and installing PrimerPro are very clear, though it takes about an hour to set it all up.

Most tasks are very straightforward and simple. I used to wish there were less hoops to jump through in importing and checking stories, but that process has been simplified now. It's organized with a windows-like appearance.

I haven't had any problems with this. If orthographies or orthography descriptions are inconsistent or ambiguous, though, it limits the capabilities of the software. If syllabic nasals are written the same as regular nasal consonants, for example, unless you mark all the syllable breaks in your word list, PrimerPro won't be able to distinguish them.

To me, PrimerPro is a dream come true, because I can use it to develop auditory discrimination activities for a pre-primer, find minimal pairs for tone, vowel length, or any other linguistic feature. It keeps track of letters taught, checks stories for any extraneous untaught letters which need to be removed from stories, and, best of all, can give you lists of usable words for any text you want to design for a given lesson. You can even tell it "find all the NOUNS with only these letters, or find (from text) entire phrases I can use in a given story. It gives consonant and vowel reports which show frequency and distribution of all graphemes, including the complex ones. If you right click on the number or graphemes in a chart, it shows you all the examples of these. Another fun thing, for a literacy person, is that you can ask it to perform advanced searches, for example: Find all the nouns containing prenasalized voiceless consonants. Voila---you're looking at the entire list! The best feature, and most broadly appealing, is that PrimerPro makes storywriting easier, by taking a lot of the drudgery out of choosing key words and built words to incorporate into a story. The story-writer's energy can go into creating interesting stories, rather than striving to come up with a few usable words.