By summertime, you won't need to learn Japanese, that is if you want to trust yourself to a fancy translation gadget touted by a company named Logbar. It looks like an iPod and it translates without the need for internet, and it talks for you. It currently translates English, Chinese and Japanese, it is called the iLi. It sounds too good to be true, and unfortunately it probably is. The company behind iLi previously launched a kickstarter project and raised over a million dollars in doing so. It was a magical ring that you could wear to interact with your smartphone or tablet, and it simply did not work. The Daily Dot reported it as "the worst product ever made".It wasn't easy to find out who made iLi, in fact Logbar purposely avoided to name themselves on their iLi website and marketing materials. But let's assume for a moment that they did indeed have a fresh start and their product does work as expected, that is quite the advancement in technology, revolutionary if not they have discovered the holy grail of translation devices because Google, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, and many other major corporations are funneling so much money towards translation and language projects but yet a startup company that failed to deliver a working product previously can now do what tens of millions of dollars of research in other companies couldn't do? We're skeptical but we'll also bite and won't be too disappointed when we find out it doesn't in fact work.Now on to another problem, their marketing. Their marketing department (or lack there-of) did a pretty poor job advertising their product. Take a look at their video and see if you can spot anything strange about it.In the US you would see this as a typical thing to do for a comedy show but generally when it happens the person being asked if they could get a kiss would be pretty okay with it, however in the video it is pretty clear that he's downright harassing some of them. While it wasn't anything as as bad what a typical chikan (pervert) would do, randomly approaching someone and asking for a kiss or touching them without explanation is pretty bad, and in Japan at least, it's something you should never do.Overall, the marketing video comes off as pretty creepy and the internet is pretty vocal about it. Some say the message is that if you buy this translation device, you can kiss foreign girls. On the other side of the spectrum, some people both men and women thought that it was a cute video and didn't believe that anyone was harassed in the video.Whatever your perspective is, their "marketing department" could have certainly opted for a safer way to market their product because now half of the internet is outraged including many native Japanese people. Somehow a company that had "the worst product ever made" now has to deal with yet another stigma, "one of the worst promotional video ever made". I doubt that the iLi will be very successful this summer when it's slated to release for the very reason that they offended their core demographic and released a failed product before. Who knows however, they could have created an incredible device, however I have yet to come across a proper review of it since it couldn't be used on the show floor at CES 2016.For the time being, you can rest assured that you'll still need to learn Japanese if you plan to talk to Japanese people and you can always do so for free using our JPLearn! Course (new lessons added regularly). Be sure to register an account with us (free) if you want to learn Japanese or just socialize with others that love the Japanese culture!

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