jan Misali,^A) also known as the Conlang Critic or the ‘Seximal guy’, is a YouTuber who primarily reviewed constructed languages before…moving on to other things.

I started watching him purely for conlang critic and it seemed to be just before he really exploded in popularity. Though that’s only to give you an idea of why I started watching Misali.

His Conlang Critic series is, in hindsight, actually kinda mediocre. He has trouble differentiating between personal opinion and fact^B) – though this isn’t as big of an issue when he’s reviewing international auxiliary languages – and…I feel he just often didn’t do a good job. Though that’s more of a feeling since I haven’t watched or re-watched the videos in a long time.
One big issue is that he’s biased towards a few bizarre concepts: he likes any base-6 or base-12 system in a language and he also likes Toki Pona. These two come up more often than you’d expect.

I think that one of my issues with Conlang Critic showed up with the Quenya/Sindarin videos – though I don’t remember which one specifically. The issue is that he said that Tolkien managed to make his languages naturalistic because he just copied existing languages. This isn’t an oversimplification as much as it is misinformation, though I’m thinking of elaborating on that in a separate article…or a few where I critique his critique videos.

His non-Conlang videos are among his best. I think I’d place the Caramelldansen and Super Mario videos as ‘Peak jan Misali’, but his videos on individual letters are fine as well.
I also think that his defense of the Imperial System is pretty good, though I did have some gripes with it when it came out. No, I don’t remember what they are.

Having just re-watched his Super Mario video, I’ve identified a few issues.
It’s very Post-Modern in style: meandering; faux-academic; a bit pretentious; aggressively neutral.
Watching it was a little tiring and I was surprised to see that there were still 30 minutes left in the video after seeing just the first 10.
I think – but I’m not sure – that these are overall issues with his style.

The ‘Seximal’ videos and Hangman are probably among his worst videos. Hangman is also his most popular video, though I find it’s a bit pretentious.
The Seximal videos are simply infuriating starting with the term ‘Seximal’. He opts for ‘seximal’ instead of ‘base-6’ or ‘Heximal’ because he thinks that the average person would ‘get’ seximal more easily because it’s derived from the number ‘six’. However, this is a very anglo-centric way of thinking which indicates to me that Misali doesn’t actually speak any language besides English (and Toki Pona)^C) – ‘Heximal’ is more language-neutral and most people know what a hexagon is. It also doesn’t include the word ‘sex’, which means it’s more likely to be taken seriously.
jan Misali uses ‘dozenal’ instead of ‘duodecimal’ for a similar reason.

Something else to note is that he promised a ‘Season 4’ of Conlang Critic, which started with High Valyrian. He released the video on High Valyrian, but it’s definitely the worst Conlang Critic video he’s ever created. Instead of actually reviewing the language, he spends the video having an existential crisis about how formulaic and boring Conlang Critic is. I find this disrespectful towards the creator of the language on the one hand (the implication is that it’s not interesting enough to have a real review). He then effectively canceled Season 4 without actually saying so. I find this to be a great transgression: if you’re canceling a series, just go out and say it.

His channel now is mostly Rhythm Heaven and Toki Pona videos. I’d mark the High Valyrian video as the beginning of the end, despite a few good videos following after it. He experienced a slow decline, basically.

• YouTube Channel
• His website
  • Mostly just propaganda espousing base-6 counting.
• Conlang Critic Critic Episode One: jan Misali by LingoLizard
  • A video that critiques the entire Conlang Critic series. I didn’t watch the whole thing, but did jump around for stuff I cared about. I think that LingoLizard doesn’t criticize Misali as much as he should and could and is overall a bit too positive.
  • There’s also apparently a moment where he suggests being Polish is inherently Islamophobic, so I’m getting SocJus vibes.
• jan Misali is one of the reasons I’ve become convinced Toki Pona is a bad language.
• jan Misali also creates remixes, which I briefly mentioned…though I’ve never really listened to any of it, so I’m not gonna comment.
• I’ll note that I haven’t seen every video he’s ever made.