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Building an app to learn languages with short stories

purplehoisin.com

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Re: Building an app to learn languages with short stories

#21

Post by westernaccess »

zeta0134 wrote: post #4

I'd be happy to pay for such a service if the stories were written by a human, but once I learned the stories are AI generated, I bounced. Even if they're edited by a native speaker, something about that feels off. I want to learn from other humans, not from a language model.

Totally agreed. I'm biased because I learn languages to mostly read texts in original languages. Narratives with well-crafted prose can have hundreds of years of linguistic and stylistic histories, as well as contemporary vernacular, which can tell more about a language than just understanding the plot of the story. I don't think that can ever be fully replaced by an LLM.

There are thousands of short stories at every level of language understanding for nearly every language in existence. I would be more interested in using AI for the languages that don't have these. (say, endangered/extinct languages, oral languages, etc)

Re: Building an app to learn languages with short stories

#24

Post by fersarr »

Two9A wrote: post #2

Quick note: your article links to webbu.app but the link text is "webu.app"; that was awfully confusing. Might be worth a pass through to proof-read; I saw another couple of typos, but the page is now throwing a Wordpress database error, so that might be more urgent to look at.

Thank you! I just updated the typo, sorry for the confusion. Thanks for the eagle eyes.The DB issue was just wordpress not being able to handle the traffic. It's back now!

Re: Building an app to learn languages with short stories

#25

Post by famouswaffles »

zeta0134 wrote: post #19
bavarianbob wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel similar, have any thoughts on what it would take for you to learn from a language model? I think for me, it's some sort of review from a native speaker. If they gave a stamp of approval, I wouldn't think twice about learning from a human versus model.

I don't think there's any claim you could make about the language model, factual or otherwise, that would resolve my primary hangup. As a non-native learner of a new language, I do not have a trained bullshit detector for that language. I cannot, by virtue of still being a novice, determine if the sentence structure sounds "weird," and I certainly can't determine if that weirdness is a limitation of the language mode…

>Language models sound like the average of several humans at best, and a strange program trying to imitate human speech at worst.

This isn't really true. Open ai use heavy rlhf to make LLMs sound like that by default but they can sound like whatever. If a native speaker says it's fine then it's fine lol. You can still choose not to use it as you can choose not to do anything but then it's an irrational fear more than real concern.

This is also essentially a substitute for graded readers for language learners

Re: Building an app to learn languages with short stories

#27

Post by technotarek »

As a French language learner, one thing I’d love to see is more interesting ways of practicing a specific area/skill (eg in French that might be the passé composé or l’imparfait). There are tons of lessons on line, but they’re boring and uninteresting. They don’t motivate you like a short story or short film where you get both practice and pleasure. It seems very doable to use LLM technologies to transform a given short story to focus on specific language skills (eg rewrite to utilize mostly a specific tense). I know it’s possible because one of my first play experiments with ChatGPT was to have it write a letter to Santa using only specific tenses. In the end you get to reinforce your comprehension and recognition of specific facets of a language. I wish this was more widely available in language learning offerings Hint, hint Duolingo, please consider allowing me to choose the skill I want to learn at a given time, at least in some way. This might apply more to intermediate and advanced learners.

Re: Building an app to learn languages with short stories

#29

Post by fersarr »

bluGill wrote: post #7

The hard part of this is finding stories you want to read. Looks cool, but The one story i read was maybe 5 minutes. To make progress you need an hour or more per day. Well you can make progress on 5 minutes per day, but 500-1000 hours is what it takes to be useful and so 5 minutes a day just doesn't add up fast enough.

Thanks for the feedback! Hopefully at some point we can add more stories, quickly. I'm also looking into other methods of learning, we should have a few more soon.

Re: Building an app to learn languages with short stories

#30

Post by fersarr »

modo_ wrote: post #9

This is really great. Congrats on shipping it! You might find https://www.lingq.com helpful as a source of inspiration. I think it's a fairly similar concept. LingQ's killer feature for me is that as you click on words (or phrases - which I find really helpful btw) to translate them, they are added to your vocabulary list. It will automatically create flashcards for you from this list for SRS. Plus when you're readin…

thank you! I will have a look at LingQ, it does look interesting. Some other people also asked me to add the vocabulary list for Webbu too, so that should be coming soon :).
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