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androngtoday at 1:44 AM1 replyview on HN

The first thing I think and my friends think when trying to learn from AI is that it is fallible. ie it makes mistakes and the student has no way of knowing its wrong. GPT 3.5 made grammar mistakes when explaining simple Japanese sentences to me in English. even the CEO of Duolingo said that AI will have "small hits to quality" https://www.linkedin.com/posts/duolingo_below-is-an-all-hand... and my housemate said that the japanese he gets from ChatGPT 4o is awkward. (I told him to prompt it in Japanese instead of English and he said the result was a lot better)

If trying to learn a language with only audio I recommend an AI-free audio podcast https://coffeebreaklanguages.com/coffeebreakspanish/


Replies

DonEsquiretoday at 2:03 AM

Great points (and appreciate the coffeebreak recommendation!). Totally agree that the AI evaluation has plenty of inconsistency and errors.

I do want to clarify - it is more like audio only practice for digital flashcards. Meaning the prompt & response are both expected to be defined ahead of time. That way, GPT (as of today), is instructed to evaluate the semantic meaning of the user's response compared to the correct response.