In my daily struggling trying to learn the German language I use to try new tools and techniques to improve my skills and be more understandable, but of course many times it doesn’t work just because “Deutsch ist eine verkackte Sprache” as my flatmate says.

But well, I love the goddamn language and I will always learn it. So I decided to install an extension for Chrome called “Language Immersion”, which is an experimental extension that changes randomly the words in the text of the websites that you are visualizing, so it mixes the normal text of your language with some words in the language you wanna learn. You can manage how deep you wanna be into the language ranging from Novice to Fluent (5 different levels)

Simple but an effective idea, isn’t it? Let me post the video that explains how this works:

I’ve tried it and after 5 minutes I stopped it. I think it was going worse than it should. Wasn’t helping at all. Now, I don’t consider myself an expert in German or that I express myself perfectly (nor in English) but I certainly find the translations really shitty. I can say it by now for German, which is a complex language that depends so much in the context and every word in a sentence makes sense when you know the other words too. If you have a sight of what Dativ, Akkusativ and other related things are, then you can get my point. The translation in Google Translate is not optimal and when the context is cut, it falls instantly like a drunk bitch with heels. I don’t wanna imagine it with Hungarian!

Is good that they are using the translation tool from Google, it is pretty massive. They even have Swahili and Yiddish available… but not Japanese! I know is another alphabet, but come on! They have Chinese!

Only 5 levels of immersion don’t give too much to play with. I was in the 4th and around 20 or 25% of the words were translated. Changed to the 5 and then all of them were translated.

A good thing is the possibility to highlight the translated words and when you don’t know the meaning you just click on the highlighted word or expression and it shows it back in the original language. But even better, if you wanna know how is it pronounced, you just hold the pointer over and it says it automatically. Of course you can disable all these features and even the extension itself whenever you want.

But yeah… is a shit and it actually could confuse more than it helps. A good idea with bad translations, few options to choose and a lack of intuition; but as I stated, it’s still experimental, the creators said. I hope gets better soon. By the moment I’ll kick it out of my Chrome.