 Hey guys, so if you're anything like me, you love languages. And you might also have Facebook. Yes, I have Facebook, but I did sign up when it was the cool thing that all the cool kids did. I know you guys don't use it anymore, but I've still got it because, well, have it. Anyway, I wanted to talk today about a specific app that I've played with recently. This app is called Prisma Text. And the reason I've decided to talk about this app is one, someone actually commented about this app in one of my comments. And two, I have been inundated with advertisements from this company. So every time I open Facebook, I've seen an advertisement from Prisma Text. Now the first 20 times, I just completely ignored it because that's how I operate. I see an advertisement whoop to scroll past. It's like, I've got an ad blocker within my eyes. But after a while actually somehow started to notice that they've spent that much money on blasting this ad in front of my conlang eyes. So I kind of noticed it, but really didn't pay attention until one of my friends reached out and he said, Hey, have you seen this app? It looks really cool. Have you tried it out? And that's basically his way of saying, I'm too cheap. I don't want to buy it. Can you buy it? Tell me if it's any good. And if it is good, then I'll buy it. And me being the easily manipulated person that I am, I took that as a, okay, well, I've got to explore this now because I've somehow become the authority on this type of thing. So I finally went and checked it out. Now, you may not believe me about how often they're spamming me with advertisements. Well, just to prove it to you, I opened Facebook for this video, okay? Just to show you guys what this advertisement looks like. I didn't even have to scroll more than two posts before I saw it. So here it is on my screen. Prisma Text lets you read classic novels and learn a language at the same time. A novel way to learn 15 plus languages. Okay, so the idea of this app is you get a book, a classic book, for example, let's say Hamlet or something like that, maybe something not so obscure, like The Princess of Mars, okay, which is one that I love. You get this book and then they're going to swap in and out the most common nouns at first for the lowest level with your target language, okay? And then as you adjust to that and you start upping the level, it starts swapping out the most common say nouns and adjectives or phrasal verbs and stuff like that. And the higher the level, the more it swaps out until eventually a large portion of what you're reading is actually your target language sliced in with your native language. Now, when I saw this concept, I thought that's a really cool concept. Like, I like the sound of that. But they're saying here you can learn 15 plus languages. Well, one of the languages I'm learning at the moment is Chinese. So I went to the website to check it out. Now, if you have a look at my browser just here, you'll see that they've got a picture of the app literally right here. And you can see they've got some text in English and then it's swapped in what looks like some Spanish on the screen right here. And the idea is, you see the words in context, you learn the words more, you learn the words based on how they would actually be used in that specific context. And it becomes kind of like you have so much context around the word that you just know how to use the word properly. I love the sound of this here. And they've actually got a really cool concept. Like this is a really smart business idea. The idea is that they are a bookstore of like all these different books, you select the book. So for example, the mystery and then you select your language and you go down and you can choose whichever one you're looking for. So English to Chinese would be what I do and then I purchase it. But you can see it's actually quite pricey for me as an Australian. I think that's American dollars, but it's still quite pricey. But look how many languages they've got. They've got a fair few languages for this one book. Did this person get this book translated into this many languages? See, I got a little bit suspicious at that point. But I figured, you know what, I'll hold off judgment and I'll actually try out the app. So what I've got here, oh, what was that? I think I just knocked my USB off the table. Okay, so I've got the app here on my phone. So I'm going to basically, you guys just saw that. Yeah, that's my wife right there. So I'm going to record my screen on my phone right now and I'm going to show you guys the actual app. So let's start. Yep, that's recording. Cool. Okay, let me go to the app. So there's my wife in the background again. Isn't she beautiful? Okay, so Prisma text. This is the app right here. And as you guys can see, I've got basically a couple of books that I've purchased. And if I open up one of these books, you can see it's swapped in a bunch of Chinese among the English. Now, I was super excited when I saw this because I was like, this is a really cool concept. And I tried it out and look how far I actually got through this book. Like I really got into this, this book and this method. But then I started to realize what was actually happening behind the scenes. Now this is the sad part. Okay. Oh, why is my phone going off? Okay, it's just saying that stop recording. So as you can see up on the screen, I sent them an email because I realized that there was a lot of problems specifically with their Chinese one, where it would swap in words that actually didn't work in that context to give you an idea. They've got the word here for let's say your arms. Okay. So you've got your arms are good or like there's a few other words, but like that's one of them. But they kept swapping in the word will see, which actually means arms, but as in small arms weaponry or something like that. And at first I was like, maybe this word does work in this context. Like I wasn't the most familiar with this specific word, but I went and looked it up and no, it never means like your physical arms. And then it became very obvious that they weren't talking about like weaponry arms. They were talking about the arms of a person. So it kept repeating this word over and over and over. And this was a big flaw. So I reached out to them and I said, look, I found a couple of problems. This is the first one. And then here's the second one. And this one was like a massive problem. So this is bay bull, which means the back, like the back of your body. Okay. And they were using it in the context of to throw back something, which you would never do in Chinese. This is a noun to throw back. There's use a verb construct in this scenario, a totally different word, no way related to bay bull. So I was not very happy about this because then I started to think, wait, so all those random nouns that I'd been learning up to this point, because I was reading a book that was a lot about war and war is not a topic that I've covered a lot in Chinese. Did I actually just learn all those wrong? And as I went back and had a look, yes, lots of them I will learn, I learned were wrong. And that annoyed the bejesus out of me, as you could imagine, because the worst mistake you can do is to learn something wrong because it's hard to like unlearn it. So I reached out to them and I said, look, I found like a lot of mistakes so far. Are you guys just using Chinese, like, like Google translate Chinese behind the scenes? And they actually responded because at first I asked for a refund because I was not happy with the product. And they said, oh, we've got a new version coming out in two weeks, etc, etc. It will fix up a few of these translation issues. So I was like, you know what, I'm going to keep going with this. And I'm going to just like double check everything it teaches me. And as you can see, they said thanks for the help and all. But then it just, it got worse and worse. So that like, there was lots of those words of mistakes. But then also the pinion was often completely wrong. So for example, in Chinese, you've got this character right here. Okay. Now, if you slap this sentence, what did you find into Google translate? It will actually say what do you find and it will turn it into dirt, which is a different word. But the characters are saying the pronunciation is different. And you can't say this. This is not, this is not correct Chinese. Okay. But Google translate does that because for whatever reason, Google translate, they just, they didn't really care about the tone markers very well. Anyway, I noticed that this app was making the exact same mistakes that Google translate was making, which made me think this is just Google translate in a wrapper. And then I was like, okay, well, this is what it should be. But in every single context, it was always popping up as dirt when it should have been day. Okay. And then there's this word, which in Chinese has two pronunciations. You've got Chung, which means long and which means to grow or elder. And it's specifically for elder, it's Jung. But every time it was used and it's often uses like a suffix in a word in Chinese. So you'd slap it on the end of lots of different words to create like something related to like an older or something like that. Anyway, often they would be using Chung, which is the completely the wrong pronunciation again. And then of course, in the app, they've got like an audio thing. So you can press on a word and you can hear the sound and it was mispronouncing it. So basically, I've come to the conclusion that although this is a super cool idea, do not by God use this for Chinese, you're literally using Google translate. Now they never admitted whether they were using Google translate or not behind the scenes. After this last email, I haven't heard from them anymore. I don't know if that's because I just kept sending them corrections and they just started to annoy them. But I would say that this app is definitely not suited for learning Chinese. Now maybe it works great for other languages and everything say say German or French. I don't know, but just assume I'm going to say at this stage until we have some type of public announcement from the company that it's literally a wrapper for Google translate, which is really sad because I actually love the concept of learning a language in like learning the at least some parts of the language in context while reading a book like that is such a cool idea. They are onto a million dollar idea here, but the execution for how it was translating things has left a really bad taste in my mouth. Anyway, I've gone on for long enough guys. Just wanted to let you guys know if you see this advertisement be super wary about this company. I don't know if it's intentional or not, if they don't have people on the team that actually know these languages. But whenever you see every single book available in 15 plus languages, they're using some type of automated translation system. That's it. See you guys.