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Building an app to learn languages with short stories

purplehoisin.com

11–20 of 61 posts

Re: Building an app to learn languages with short stories

#11
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.

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.

Re: Building an app to learn languages with short stories

#12
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.

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 just read the article and OP actually does get it checked by a native speaker. You still have concerns despite that additional step?

Re: Building an app to learn languages with short stories

#14
I think this is a great idea! I am also working on an app and we've just added a similar feature.

It's illustration heavy picture book with multiple difficulty levels and recordings by native speakers for each line of text. The goal is for students to be able to learn languages while they read. Ideally, without having to translate words - though we do provide a lookup tool. Each line in the story is read by a native speaker, and the reader has the option to record themselves and play it back to check their pronunciation.

Our first story "Ari & Chali go to the Market" teaches Thai classifiers and is perfect for someone who has completed Reading Thai Made easy or is just learning how to read.

We hope to develop more content like this for Thai, as well as other languages.

Reading Thai Made Easy: https://emurse.io/course/TdXFGTB/lessons Ari & Chali go to the Market: https://emurse.io/presentation/BnkcnXB

Re: Building an app to learn languages with short stories

#17
post #5

I'm learning Japanese and something like this would be beneficial. > You should be able to tap on a word and get a translation. This functionality is available already on Kindle though :) you have the option of uploading your own dictionaries to it too. That, combined with using https://www.clippings.io/ to manage highlighted text, makes the kindle an all round great tool for learning languages from books, or any tex…

I find the feature on Kindle to be awful to use. It's sluggish and I've got to do additional work to import the highlights into clippings where I'll then have to do more work to put it somewhere I can consistently review? ugh. The experience OP and software like LingQ have created makes learning words a joy and it's sustainable.

Re: Building an app to learn languages with short stories

#18
post #5

I'm learning Japanese and something like this would be beneficial. > You should be able to tap on a word and get a translation. This functionality is available already on Kindle though :) you have the option of uploading your own dictionaries to it too. That, combined with using https://www.clippings.io/ to manage highlighted text, makes the kindle an all round great tool for learning languages from books, or any tex…

NHK Web News Easy is pretty good. I built a simple browser extension that would hide the furigana and then show it when you clicked on it. If you're interested, I could dig that up.

Ultimately, I got sick of splicing together different home-grown tools and different web sites that I started to build my own to provide a more integrated learning experience that adapts to how students want to learn.

I am working on a Japanese course with a well-known Japanese teacher, and we're hoping to start rolling that out soon. Feel free to DM me if you're interested in that or want to chat about learning Japanese.

Re: Building an app to learn languages with short stories

#19
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.

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 model, some hallucination, whatever. So, by learning from that model, I would pick up any mistakes it makes and fold those into my own speech patterns.

If I'm going to pick up speech patterns at all, I would really rather pick them up from a native speaker of the language, since at the very least I'll make the sorts of mistakes that a human might make. I want to sound like human, not like a language model. Language models sound like the average of several humans at best, and a strange program trying to imitate human speech at worst.

Once I'm fluent in a language, enough to recognize when the language model itself is probably making a mistake, then I might become comfortable using it. But not as my first introduction to the nuances of the language, when I'm still building my own internal representation up from scratch. After all, my goal is to converse with other human speakers. Shouldn't that be my personal training corpus? I'm a neural network too, and I don't want to feed myself bad data.

Re: Building an app to learn languages with short stories

#20
This sounds great. I could imagine it takes inspiration from (or could take inspiration from) programs like Dreaming Spanish, a series of videos that are ranked at different levels of Spanish. The philosophy behind the programs is that what is most important is the active consumption of another language, like by listening and trying to understand. That actually our intuition that we need to work on generating the foreign language, by speaking or writing it, hasn't necessarily been shown by research. Instead, actively consuming another language at a level at or very slightly above your current level is perhaps the best way to become fluent at that language.

In terms of the content that you're creating, I always thought it would be very interesting to have leveled plays written in the target language. I always thought that reading how people actually speak might be more useful than reading prose.

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