Prismatext

Have the language set to high but need more Spanish and less English.

Fascinating app! Only I wish that for the languages that do not use the English alphabet, that there would be an option to toggle the text to be readable in the alphabet without having to click the word to pull it up with the sounding and all that as well. I would be buying so many books of that feature was added!

I would like to say great judging from the intro sample, but when trying to down load a book the app says not available at this time. What a bummer. I was ready to start learning some Spanish but I am now quickly losing interest. Thanks for killing my interest in learning a new language.

I was pleasantly surprised at the selection of books available. You can pick the level you consider to be in the new language. I picked “very low” so I’m being introduced slowly and that works great for me. The book lets us stay on the pronunciation and replay as many times as we need. I think this is going to help my Spanish, and I would be reading the book anyway.

I wish I could rate this higher as I truly think it’s a fantastic idea. I think encountering words organically in a story is such a great way to learn and I can’t find any other resource that does this. So I truly hope Prismatext will invest more resources into improving this app and fixing some of the issues I’ve noticed. I’ll start with the positives: the selection of books is good and the ebook interface is great. It’s very well-designed, I like the font and the way it scrolls. I don’t normally like reading ebooks on my phone but I found this format avoids a lot of the issues with other e-reader apps. The words in the Target language will be underlined in purple and you can opt to tap to see them in their native language or figure it out from context, and there’s also an option to play an audio of the word or phrase. Another thing I like is that once a word is introduced, it seems to be consistently translated every time it appears. Although I haven’t gotten very far into the book, my understanding is the density of words in the target language gradually increases. Unfortunately, all of these great features are only valuable if the underlying translation is accurate, and just two chapters into my book I’ve already noticed multiple significant, obvious errors. For context, I am reading Frankenstein, a book I chose because I’m very familiar with the story, and my target language is Spanish which, like many Americans, I learned in school and have since lost and am now trying to re-learn. So I was surprised when, very early in the book, I saw a word I’d never seen before, “tripular”. I clicked on the underline and was given the original word from the story as “man”. Since anyone who’s taken a single Spanish class could have told you that the word for man is “hombre”, I looked “tripular” up on SpanishDict, a reputable online Spanish dictionary, and learned that it’s an infinitive verb meaning “to man” as in “to man a ship”. In the context of the sentence, man was clearly meant to be used as a noun. This is the kind of translation error you tend to see with word-for-word translations from something like Google Translate (or rather, you might have seen an error like this from Google Translate 10 years ago, it’s since gotten much better). I could probably forgive an error like this if it was translating a more complex idea or a single word in a longer phrase, but something as basic as man? To make matters worse, “man” was translated several other times in t

I started to read and felt it was slow. However, getting further into the text, I believe it will move along well.

Works well and is enjoyable

They make you buy a book just to find out the translation audio speaks SO FAST that you cannot possibly understand the words. It’s a useless app. I want a refund asap.

Prismatext needs some attention. The program does not interface with Apple’s Password Manager. You will need to write down your password. This should be an easy fix for Prismatext’s programmers. Hopefully they will get on it.

The premise is brilliant. I have three issues. I am learning Arabic. 1) even at low level the phrases are sometimes quite long. Shorter phrases or single words would be best at low level (I know enough to know the word boundaries are very different in this language). 2. The transliterated text should follow the pronunciation precisely. When the trailing hamarbatu is pronounced “h” it should not be written as “t”. 3. Arabic fonts are not scaled proportionally to English — the script may be the same point size, but it is naturally tighter and smaller. Arabic fonts should be scaled 1/8 larger for legibility