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Comment by apollo_mojave | Hacker News Reader

I am a full time language student, and I use GPT to have "conversations" in the language. I can give it a subject (e.g., going through airport customs) and practice my conversation skills.

What's also fun is I can feed it a list of vocab that I want it to use, and it'll find ways to put the words in the conversation. I also ask it to go back, look at my responses, and correct for grammar etc.

It's shocking how adept it is.

What also lurks in the back of my mind is the possibility that mine is the last generation that will bother learning a foreign language at all. I think the day of the universal translator is approaching.

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> I can feed it a list of vocab that I want it to use, and it'll find ways to put the words in the conversation.

I told it to write a story for me using only the top 100 most common words in Hungarian. First, it complained about how the concept of a "word" is ambiguous in Hungarian and that it's difficult to know what the top 100 words are. Then it told me a story using only common vocabulary. It wasn't grammatically perfect, but definitely a cool ability. I suppose you could also give it your own list of the words you know, and have it have a conversation with you only using those words. If you had an ongoing conversation with it, it could add new words as it realizes that you've learned them. I think this actually has the potential to make a new type of language learning app that could be really cool.

This gave me an idea for a conversation:

Me: "Can you write a gramatically correct sentence using only the word "buffalo"?"

GPT: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

Me: "Now can you write a sentence with the same meaning but only using synonyms of the world buffalo?"

GPT: "Bison bison Bison bison confuse confuse Bison bison."

Well... almost!

Ours might be the last generation that will bother to learn anything, as universal everything seem to be approaching. But I think there will be a premium on all things "human".

There will definitely still be "hobbyists" who will learn languages for the fun of it. And in certain academic fields I guess they'll still expect people to know a language. But yeah, for the ordinary person, what's the point?

As far as education goes, maybe! That's a bolder claim IMO...

If you don’t need to learn anything you also don’t need to do anything. You’re obsolete and taking up resources, and the universe will correct that and make you extinct sooner or later.

That’s post singularity AGI territory, and nobody really knows what that will look like, but I do have serious doubts that there is room for humanity in that world.

I want even aware it had good multi language support. I will use it for language practice

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