The PrimerPrep program is designed to help you:

• analyze texts in a language to discover the words and letters used in the language, and how frequently they occur
• specify what to analyze, by selecting which words to analyze, how to count them, and how to break them apart (with affixes)
• provide a suggested teaching order, i.e. the order in which these letters might be introduced in a primer, and show you what words from your texts are available in each lesson
• modify the order of letters in the teaching order, and add sight words
• analyze your text for each lesson and mark untaught residue in red, to draw it to your attention.

Initial steps with PrimerPrep (Extracted from the help file)

Note: Sometimes the program takes a little while to start up, or to open a file dialog. This seems to be caused by the graphics engine used. Just be patient. Usually those operations are faster the second time.

At a basic level, the PrimerPrep program is very simple to use. Simply select the Add Text(s) button from the starting screen, select a text file in the language you want to analyze, and click Open. PrimerPrep analyzes the words in the file, and displays a list of words, sorted by decreasing order of frequency. If you do not have any special analysis needs, you can then simply click on the Teaching Order tab, and view your results.

PrimerPrep calculates the “optimal” teaching order, using the elimination algorithm, and presents it as a list of letters with their frequencies. The example words shown are simply the words found in your text file(s) which are available at that point in the teaching order (formed from letters at that level or higher in the teaching order). The breadth of example words presented depends on the size and breadth of your example text(s) that you selected to analyze. You can easily modify the suggested teaching order, and PrimerPrep will re-calculate the example words available.