Why Use AI
AI certainly can be a valuable and efficient tool to help someone learn a language, but it fully depends on the user. When will they start using it? How much will they use it? Will AI replace their in-person practice?
Translation improvement
While AI doesn’t perfectly understand nuance, it understands nuance a thousand times better than Google Translate in 2018.
As a heritage speaker in Russian and Ukrainian, I sometimes struggled communicating with my grandmother when she was in town.
I remember one time several years ago where I needed to make sure she didn’t move a potted plant while cleaning. I didn’t know how to say the word “plant” so I opened up google translate. Confidently, I approached her and said, “Don’t move the plant.” But she looked like I had said the stupidest thing in the world. She did in fact end up moving the plant, and it took an explanation from my parents later that Google had translated the word “plant” into “factory”.
But AI wouldn’t make that mistake. Now, we can paste a whole paragraph into an AI chatbot and recieve a pretty accurate translation.
Using the Target Language
This is where AI gets really helpful. You can prompt it to act like a coach, and you can tell it to only speak in your target language.
Not only that, but you can prompt it to where if you don’t know a word, it will encourage you to describe the word you’re thinking with words that you already understand.
While hard at first, practice makes it much easier over time and conversations in the target language get much easier. You can use the prompt I use for free by clicking here.
How Far Can We Go?
AI simplifies many tasks that used to be difficult to do, and it can put you into great situations for practice.
But the point of learning a language is to speak with real people. Not that AI is not a good way of practice, but it’s easier, but only because it’s not intimidating to speak to AI.
AI should be used as a tool to help you speak with real people. If it is taking away from that, remind yourself, why are you learning a language in the first place?
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