Comment by antonaf
1 day ago
Yes, I can understand and empathize with your experience. Quite honestly our current focus is more for B1+ students. That 0 -> 1 / bootstrapping of the language is much better served by traditional material that is less talking / listening-heavy.
Unfortunately, I think you will soon learn that the market for advanced language learners is 1/500th the size of the market for beginner learners. But thank you very much and please keep focusing on us.
Indeed.
I’m one of those 1/500 in multiple languages, and I love resources like these.
That said, if they want to make money, the beginner / false beginner market is huge.
I think I'm around A2 in Japanese and find myself kinda scared by all these talking apps. I don't mind texting, because it gives me time to look up what I don't know and much more time to think about my response, but talking just makes me feel very anxious. Eventually I have to get over the barrier, but it is a barrier to entry and could scare people away.
I do think immersion is generally better, but it is not only harder, an AI app doesn't seem like it could do the right kind of immersion (missing body language, visual cues, seeing the mouth movements, and all sorts of other things one gets from watching a podcast, or even better, in person interaction).
This is demonstrably false. Natural language acquisition is almost entirely listening and talking. The fastest and most consistently effective way to learn a language is immersion. The reason traditional material doesn't attempt immersive techniques is because it is much much easier to print a static book than it is to produce interactive and adaptive content.
The promise and potential of LLM based language learning apps is that you can cross that gap to full immersion in a way that has never been possible before.
Please be more ambitious.
Learning primarily through listening and talking only works if you have an enormous amount of high quality data, ie, the situation you're in as a baby when you're surrounded by native speakers who are producing speech for hours every day.
If you are an adult and want to spend, say, a couple of hours each week learning a language from scratch, especially without constant access to a native speaker, your initial progress will be much faster if you study grammar and vocabulary in a traditional class from a text book, than if you just try to pick up patterns from listening to the TV or something.
I can't source my claim. I attended a public lecture years ago from a researcher about exactly this misconception.
> Natural language acquisition is almost entirely listening and talking.
And it's bootstrapped by 1+ year of listening before being even able to speak, let alone talk intelligibly. That's not really an appealing process to anyone beyond that age.
Your comment sparked an idea of a conversation with an agent where at any time you could ask, “what’s this word?” and it would respond with an image explaining it. I’m surprised there don't seem to be voice apps that integrate any visual content.
> Natural language acquisition is almost entirely listening and talking
Listening and reading. Talking goes last. See Steve Kaufmann, for example
> The reason traditional material doesn't attempt immersive techniques is because it is much much easier to print a static book than it is to produce interactive and adaptive content.
No, that's not correct.
First off, you can provide immersion with static books. A common favorite here on HN is Lingua Latina per se illustrata ["the Latin tongue explained by itself"].
Second off, there are two reasons that traditional material doesn't do this. The biggest one is student demand; people are afraid of immersion. The second is that the traditional approach is faster. It's lower quality, and it tops out well below the level you hope to reach, but it's faster, not slower. It takes babies a year to learn to say they're hungry. It takes an elementary school class studying a foreign language less than a day.