Comment by 999900000999
1 day ago
It would probably be better to pick one or two languages, actually work with native speakers to make sure it's right.
These "we cover every single language" tools get it like 75% right at best.
1 day ago
It would probably be better to pick one or two languages, actually work with native speakers to make sure it's right.
These "we cover every single language" tools get it like 75% right at best.
I disagree because of how AI is progressing and because there's tons of neglected language markets they can pick up. Obviously your approach can work too, perhaps better. But 95% of language learning tools don't support Thai (my target language) for example so I am an eager user for that reason alone. I think they'll be able to make a generalized curriculum and have the AI use it in all languages.
Most of the generalized curriculum stuff out there is crap because languages differ from each other in substantial ways. LLMs in principle should help here as they can use their knowledge of the structure of the language to modify, but we're just not there with context windows and thinking capabilities. They will need at least a per-language (ideally per language pair) system prompt that contains a rough outline of the curriculum.
I think the curriculum areas you're referring to are for learners in the beginning and intermediate stages. In which case, fair enough, although I still think you could get pretty far by just prompting an LLM, as the LLM has read hundreds of books teaching how to learn each language. But that's not really my point; my point is that once you're an advanced learner (they claim this is their target market) who knows about 12,000 words, I think you know almost all of the grammar, and the remaining bits will get picked up along the way effortlessly via immersion. What you need help with in this stage is slogging through the next 10,000 vocab words you need to learn to get to extreme fluency or the next 25,000 you need to learn to become plausibly native-level, as well as the speaking and reading practice to make your reading faster (if it's a different character set to your native language) and make your speaking effortless.
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Would you rather have a tool that teaches you accurate conversational Spanish ?
Or something that tries to teach 60 languages but does so poorly ?
My tool supports Thai, if you'd like to try it - https://nuenki.app . I added it at the request of a user, who seems to be happy with it.
It's a browser extension that finds English sentences in webpages, and translates the ones at your difficulty level into the language you're learning.
Thank you, I will try it, although I'd prefer to translate entire sentences into Thai randomly. Perhaps you can add this advanced mode. Actually, I saw your app before while looking for an alternative to Toucan that supported Thai, but at that point in time you hadn't added support yet. Thanks for doing so.
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That's a pretty sick idea. Unfortunately I presume it involves sending your browsing data (e.g. page contents) to the server?
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