Comment by mahathu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mahathu | Hacker News Reader

I like the Anki shoutout.

I personally would be cautious learning an extra language through a tool like this though, especially for a huge list of supposedly supported languages like this. Chat-GPT gets basic concepts like verb suffixes wrong, that is, explaining those concepts and generating example sentences, when I was trying it out a few months ago. I wouldn't mind conversations feeling a bit awkward or unrealistic, (EDIT: as they do here), but I wouldn't trust AI tools atm to get sentence structure, spelling and pronunciation (!) all completely right which is imperative for such a tool to function (and this one didn't for the two languages I tested).

If we assume the AI is already at that level, it would be trivial to have it show translations to user's native languages instead of only to English and excluding a number of potential revenue-generators for the capitalist machine ("learners").

Your prompt leaked in the text box when I pressed the Start Conversation button multiple times, and the site seems to be getting HN-hugged-of-death right now.

Also, adding to the person who mentioned this being close sourced, if a "deep-rooted desire not to look foolish in front of others" was among my reasons not to talk to a stranger in an extra language, I don't think I'd be any more likely speaking into a microphone, alone, in a room, like I'm conducting my biannual mandatory TOEFL© test every two years.[1]

[1]: This one is actually worse because you're in a room with 10+ others simultaneously talking into a computer screen, not talking to a person but just having your voice recorded, and it's outrageous ETS is getting away with charging people like 200 bucks (getting to see feedback for your grade is extra)

Anki is such a great product.

That makes sense. I do understand the worries about learning from AI. It's worth saying that different software is used for transcribing what you say (rather than ChatGPT), and that's been trained on lots of data (including YouTube videos) of people speaking that language, not to say that it could never get it wrong. But I definitely hear what you're saying about ChatGPT sentence structure on the less popular languages.

Good point about open sourcing. I definitely agree.

> Chat-GPT gets basic concepts like verb suffixes wrong, that is, explaining those concepts and generating example sentences

This matters if you ask it for grammar. But you can get to a pretty advanced level before this starts to affect you when trying to have a conversation which is usually far more forgiving. And while ChatGPT certainly makes errors, even for a minor language like Norwegian it gets it close enough that I can get it to have a perfectly fine conversation in minor regional dialects.

I think the best thing to do is to pair something like this with a more traditional course for learning the specific rules, because starting to speak as early as possible is a great way of building a level of fluency that takes ages otherwise. Not least because ChatGPT will still understand you pretty well if you mix two languages within a sentence, so you can start talking almost right away and tell it to translate as needed.

You can already ask this app to translate things to your own language - I had it both translate French to Norwegian, and asked it a question in French which it translated to French before responding.

Not in agglutinative languages where verb endings considerably change the meaning of a sentence.

Even then you'll find a conversational environment far more forgiving, because of a combination of context and a feedback loop. There's a reason childhood acquisition of language works just fine without an explicit practice of grammar rules.

The point isn't that you wouldn't benefit from it doing better, but that it doesn't need to be anywhere near perfect to help a typical language student improve.

I actually think I disagree with this. Yes it'd be incorrect some of the time, but that is also true of humans. Provided it gets it right most of the time and is reasonably fluent, I don't think that minor errors would matter much.

This seems much more a tool for practicing the stuff you learn in another context to me, rather than a way of learning in itself. You can use it without the social pressure of stumbling slowly through sentences with another person.

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