I am currently writing some texts about learning languages. This reminded me about something that I found very amusing.

A while back I used to see ads for a company called Natively Language Academy almost everywhere. Right from the start I felt that they weren’t to be trusted, because they are one of those companies that claim that you can learn a language in an incredibly short amount of time. Such claims are often very dishonest, and Natively proudly proclaim in their ads that you can learn a language in ten days with them, which is something I find highly doubtful.

But when I started seeing more ads from them I was very amused and now I trust them even less. One ad in particular was so bad that I feel the need to share my feelings about it.

The ad in question is a vertical banner that I’ve seen on several sites. It shows balls with different national flags on them flying over a black background, and above them is the text “Choose your language.”

The flags on the balls are Japanese, Swedish, Swiss, Russian, Canadian, Italian, and Israeli. At first I was confused by the Swiss, Canadian and Israeli flags. In Canada the official languages are English and French, in Switzerland the official languages are German, French, Italian and Romansh, and in Israel the official languages are Hebrew and Arabic. I was a bit curious how those flags could allow you to directly “Choose your language.”

Wondering which of the languages I would get if I clicked on one of those flags, I moved my mouse pointer over the ad. I found that if you do that, you get like a little tooltip-text floating over the flag you hold your pointer over it. And I was surprised by the results.

The Japanese, Russian and Italian flags all showed the right languages. The Israeli flag showed the text “Hebrew”, which I guess is alright. But holding your pointer over the Swedish flag shows “Danish”, the Swiss flag triggers the text “Swedish”, and the Canadian flag gives you “Candian” [sic].

Ok, Sweden and Denmark are geographically very close, and the languages are etymologically pretty close too. But I would never trust a language academy that states that the languages are interchangeable. And I thought that it was only in bad comedies people constantly confuse Sweden with Switzerland.

And seriously, Candian? First of all, I don’t think that even one spelling error is allowed in an ad for a language academy, especially not when there are so very few words in the ad in the first place. Secondly, even if they would have written Canadian, what language is that?

I’m wondering if I should sign up for a class just to see if I can learn to speak Candian in ten days.

I do understand that it is probably not Natively that made the actual ad; they just ordered it from some ad company. But even so I wouldn’t trust them as a language school, even if they are better than the people who made the ad at telling one country and one language from another. This still really shows that they do not at all verify the accuracy things done for them, so I wouldn’t trust any textbooks that they produce.

So, in short I would say that my recommendation is to stay away from Natively if you want to learn a language.