Grammar Up

30.06.2009
English grammar is hard, whether you're a native speaker or someone learning it as an additional language. app lets you use your iPhone or iPod touch to refine your grammar through a series of multiple-choice quiz questions. It works, but suffers from some serious design failings.

Primarily designed to help you prepare for English proficiency tests , features 1,800 multiple choice questions spread across 20 different categories. The categories cover just about every topic I could imagine. From adjectives to conjunctions, from adverbs to word families, they're all there. You can set the number of questions you want on a particular test, in addition to picking a category or a "mixed test" with questions from various categories.

The tests themselves are fairly straightforward. Tap on one of the four available choices to select it as your answer and advance to the next question. A progress meter at the bottom indicates how much time you have left to answer the question. (The default of one minute is a little too high--I recommend reducing it to 20 seconds.)

There are a couple of neat touches here: If you find your grammar skills wanting, you can shake your iPhone to give up and move to the next question. You can also put your finger onto the screen while a question is displayed and drag it downward to reveal the correct answer hidden behind the question.

There are, however, also some omissions. You can't return to any question once you've answered and moved past it, even if you just did it seconds ago, which means that there is no way to correct an accidental tap. The app also doesn't freeze its timer if you put it into sleep mode during a quiz. And there's no way to save your progress for later and abort in the middle of a quiz. (It also won't track your score if a call comes in while you have a quiz in progress.)

I appreciate the cross-training nature of the mixed quiz, but would have appreciated a slightly more advanced mode where you could forego the multiple-choice prompts and directly enter answers for questions which have only one possible correct answer.