Comment by itake
1 day ago
I'm trying to learn vietnamese, but the lessons are really really rough and borderline bad advice.
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AI: Anh mệt is good if bạn are a man speaking about yourself. You can also say, “Em mệt” if you’re a woman.
this isn't correct. If you are of "older brother" age and are male, you say Anh. Em is for if you are "younger person" (does not matter the gender). Women tend to prefer being called "em" (even if they are older), because women prefer to be identified as younger than their true age... But that doesn't mean you can't call younger men em.
A good tutor would know your age relative to theirs and explain this context.
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It would say english phrases with a vietnamese accent.
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It also would give me really complex vietnamese phrases that I am not ready for. when I prompt for an explaination or translation, it would get off track from the original thing we were learning.
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Way more people in Vietnam (and the globe) speak southern Vietnamese, but the tutors seem to be from north Vietnam.
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The STT also was very forgiving if I pronounced things incorrectly. Or it would confuse english and vietnamese. I would say, "Phai", but it heard "bye"
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I was ready to pull out my credit card, but I can't trust it to teach me the right information. I pay $160/mo for Vietnamese tutoring ($20 per class). This would be way cheaper and I don't have to schedule my classes.
We are really sorry for the subpar experience. We did not test Vietnamese, and it seems like the quality is not sufficient. Thanks for pointing out the issues.
This sounds very much like the kinds of mistakes that LLMs typically make. It's a pity, I would love a good language learning platform.
A fundamental problem with language learning built around an LLM is that the one thing you can guarantee is that no two people will have a consistent experience, nor is there ever going to be a 100% freedom-from-error. That makes it very hard to predict and therefore market what or how people will learn.
I think this company will end up pivoting into a B2B context before long. Hopefully they will still stick to the mission, but who knows (and I wouldn't fault them if they don't – survival comes first).
The trend I've seen in these AI tech companies is they launch their MVP using base models (or in this case fine tuning gpt4). This gives them enough traction for a seed round, but 2+ years later, they don't have the talent to actually improve the product beyond this.
If OpenAI puts resources to language learning, they could build a great product. But 3rd party devs relying on someone's tech hasn't proven to be a good strategy.
> nor is there ever going to be a 100% freedom-from-error
That is not a problem. Language is messy, you don't need 100% accuracy to learn. The problem is that LLM errors are fundamentally different from human errors, and you won't even know how to recognize them.
Your interlocutors can work around human errors, because they tend to follow the same patterns in same language. But they will freak out with LLM errors.
Hey, it’s great to see other people learn Vietnamese! And your feedback is on point. I’m still at the beginning and just built a tool to help me learn basic phrases. I will very much appreciate the feedback! https://envn.app
I haven't figured out what works for me yet when learning Vietnamese, so I'm not really sure yet was advice to give.
Trying out your tool, I'd really like to know if the sound is north or southern Vietnamese. I think your tool is southern vietnamese, but idk.. I personally prefer learning southern, but all the AI TTS tools use the north dialect. Ideally, I'd like a 'pure' southern accent and not a hybrid.
For your tool, You might want to get into the way to address people (Anh, em, ba, co, etc). You seem to just use toi (which I hear vietnamese people using with each other too...) but my understanding is the (Anh/Em/Ba/etc) are more 'intimate' whereas toi is more formal/business like?
One idea I haven't tried too much of yet is making flash cards that teach me a sentence structure, but introduce new vocabulary. Learning a diaspora of phrases works for short 2-3 word ones, but when I try to learn more complex sentences, my brain isn't able to draw the patterns as nothing is connected.
For example, trying to learn "bạn tên là gì" and "nhà vệ sinh ở đâu" (from your website) is harder than learning "Bạn tên là gì?", "Bạn nghề là gì?", "Bạn số điện thoại là gì?"
The other huge challenge I have is feeling like I am making progress. I'm definitely getting better, but its pretty disheartening to study for 40+ hours and still can't pronounce words like Can Tho properly, despite knowing how to read and write.
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My email is in my profile. Feel free to reach out to me if you have more updates or want to bounce ideas.