Saturday, July 25, 2009

New Look wordPROF® -- Please Comment

www.wordprof.com was originally created to promote a CD-ROM called “wordPROF® French”. The CD-ROM is no longer on sale but the site remains fairly popular and had about 30,000 visits and a million page hits in the 12 months to March 2009. I have recently redesigned the site to remove all promotional references to the CD-ROM and to change the color scheme but there were no changes to the vocabulary or to the teaching style.

The site is implemented in Classic ASP, a technology which has been superseded by .NET, and I don’t know how much longer this will be supported. The client side of the 'Scenes' feature is written in VBScript and this is only supported in Internet Explorer -- so apologies to Firefox users.

I have a draft Spanish vocabulary up to GCSE level and another version of the French with translations in American English (rather than British English) so these could be made available if there is sufficient demand.

(By the way, I use American spelling on this blog so don’t bother reporting my ‘mistakes’.)

Please use this blog for any feedback about the site and how it fits into your language learning.

Do you prefer the new color scheme?

Do you have a problem getting the scenes to work eg if you are a Firfox user?

Do you want to learn Spanish?

Do you prefer British or American English?

4 comments:

Liz said...

WordPROF is very useful and thank you very much for making it available without charge. It is of course irritating sometimes when perfectly acceptable answers are 'marked' wrong. I suppose it's a lot of work to make alternative answers acceptable.
It would be good if you could add an i with tréma to the virtual accented keys.

Best wishes

Liz

Anonymous said...

I have found wordProf very useful for both learning new vocabulary and for consolidating knowledge of existing vocabulary. I particularly like the feature which enables the user to take a test and that then gives an estimate of vocabulary size and the fact that the number of words included is large (i.e. over 9000 words).

Rebecca

John said...

Having just started to use this site I have already found one mistake, from french to english, Goûter = taste or to have a snack, acording to my french dictionary. Perhaps it means a different thing in an american dictionary.

Mr wordPROF said...

John needs a better dictionary.