Posted by Anon84 3 days ago
But despite being a native English speaker, they couldn’t be bothered to actually write the article themselves. What’s the point of learning a language - any language - if you’re not even going to use your own words like an adult?
But, the learning writeups that lead with the "learning something new" part kind of feel better the those who put unnecessary emphasis on "canceled tutor". So, you get something inspiring like a book they can read now (and could not before), about podcast they understood (and could not before) or a little about successful small talk in French. I have no idea about what the author learned in what time.
I used voice mode on ChatGPT to learn the tones for mandarin, and general vocab and sentence structure while for Japanese it helped me expand proper sentence structure greatly.
It sounds silly, but it helped reenforce a base structure that is helpful and having it confirmed by a tutor was nice. Best is I can really do it whenever. What op posted does sound next stage, and I can imagine it’d be a viable platform.
I don’t suggest notebookllm to make an audiobook, I tried and it was the most dryest speech I ever heard. It did sound convincing enough if you were to do a podcast for it and that is what it does.. but it was completely horrid for learning but maybe that’s just me.
Language is (for almost every adult) deeply personal. Even the best of teachers must be so nuanced for every error correction, repetition request, nudging, encouraging, etc. Why? Because the adult student is greatly affected by human feedback in this context.
This is one of the (many!) reasons why children learn languages (their first included) kinda fast. Their ego isn't involved.
Learning with a non-human, at least for me, is kinda cool as I don't feel bad telling it "look, I get it, don't ask me that again" and I don't take it personally when it says "that's not quite right."
I've got tons of experience as both a language student and a teacher, btw.
It helps with speaking and talking. not writing. To me that is ok, I’m stronger learning writing and reading but having the AI enforce me to speak and not be embarrassed is fantastic.
For reference, I’ve passed JLPT N4, and can probably pass N3, until recently I had no true talking or replying experience just reading/writing. Whenever I’d speak, I’d stammer, stutter and overall was anxious. I get it sometimes in English too which is my native language but..
Going back to review previous books, chapters of language books or chapters of children books/intermediate books and manga and set it up as an interactive voice coaching session helped me enforce speaking and communicating in a natural sense. It was what I was doing on italki but then you run into Cost, scheduling and the same spend ten minutes to catch up and review minimum. If you schedule more, 2 hours or such it can get exhausting and can be harder to schedule unless you plan weeks in advance with a popular tutor.
Honestly helped a ton with the minimal amount of work I put into setting it up.
Watch movies and listen to people if you want grammar to stick. Languages are living things. Not something you practice in a bubble with Anki and Duolingo.
The only bit I thought could be LLM was:
> The gap in my tutoring setup wasn’t the quality of the instruction. It was two structural things.
Even here, the second sentence is quite weak, none of that stupid punchy sentence that LLM likes to copy from (probably) TED Talks because it thinks that'll make the text fucking profound.
This just isn't a reliable source, even putting aside trying to measure language proficiency through memorising grammar.