Comment by drakonka
1 day ago
I had a similar feeling with Swedish just now. It isn't really much different than conversing with ChatGPT in advanced voice mode - it's up to me to drive the conversation and it all feels quite arbitrary (and I find myself instinctively falling back on topics I know how to talk about, which quite defeats the purpose). I was hoping for a more structured learning plan that strategically expands my comfort zone and skills in a guided way.
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah we need to improve the beginner experience, it's more tailored towards intermediate/advanced students at the moment.
I'm an advanced learner but I stopped after a few moments because it's boring. It's asking me questions that you'd ask a beginner (although a beginner wouldn't understand the questions). It just asked what food I like to eat, where I like to travel, whether I like the weather, etc. I have a language tutor IRL and I have found that we run out of things to talk about too. So we often find ourselves just discussing the latest events from the news. I think you should feed fresh conversation topics daily from a data source like the news, localized to the user. There are global news APIs you can subscribe to.
I'm not sure that would solve the problem. Ultimately this (and speaking with LLMs in general) feels a lot like filling in an adaptive form rather than talking to a human being. The LLM, for example, is never going to go on and tell you some anecdote from its life (and if it were prompted to do so it would come across as quite insincere). It's not going to say, "Oh that neighborhood is not safe," when you tell it about where you'll live when studying abroad. It's not going to recommend supplementary material (or worse, it will...with broken links that never existed).
I'm not even sure this helps with speaking practice since it's just a test of whether what you said can be transcribed by Whisper, which is not at all a test of correct pronunciation. I just tried it with the most horrid, butchered accent I could muster, and it still worked...if I practiced for months on end like that, I'd end up in a very difficult place as a language learner.
Do you mean that the experience is meant to have more structure if you pick the intermediate or advanced level? (fwiw I did pick intermediate for my Swedish level in the app).
My thinking is - I can have unstructured conversations with Advanced Voice Mode or in real life here in Sweden. What I'd really appreciate is a guided learning experience taking me up from intermediate/slightly above intermediate to fluent in the most efficient possible way (as opposed to just having us 'ramble' about random topics of my own choosing).
There is a structured curriculum that gets generated after the intro lesson (if you responded yes to the curriculum question).
This is available for all proficiencies. It's just much harder to talk for hours in a new language as a beginner. It's usable but requires more effort.
1 reply →
So basically if you are starting a new language from zero, then this is not for you?
That's correct.
Why wouldn't intermediate/advanced students just talk directly to ChatGPT? From what I see, I thought your value prop was for the beginners.
ISSEN is designed from the ground up for this use case.
* curriculum, completely customizable, with grammar, roleplay, topics, speaking speech, transcript, dictionary, corrections, etc
* prompting and AI models all chosen to be a better fit for multilingual, easy to understand, etc.
* the tutor actively tries to teach you, it's not an assistant
* integrated flashcards that go hand in hand with the speaking immersion
As an intermediate German speaker I thought it was great!