I’m just starting to learn Mandarin at the moment and I’ve found LLMs useful for this. I can ask the question
“I’m learning Mandarin, can you break this sentence into individual hanzi and explain it?” and it will do a good job of explaining everything. Or I can say something like
“I was transcribing an audio recording for an exercise and I wrote X but the answer was Y, what did I do wrong?” and it will tell me that I misheard 妈 (ma, the question particle) as 马 (mǎ, which means “horse”) etc. Or I can paste in a sentence and ask it if it’s grammatically correct, and it will explain what I did wrong and how to correct it.
For instance:
> > I’m learning Mandarin, can you break this sentence into individual hanzi and explain it? 果汁很好喝
> Certainly! Let's break down the sentence "果汁很好喝" into individual hanzi (Chinese characters) and explain what each character and the whole sentence mean.
> - 果 (guǒ) - Fruit
> - 汁 (zhī) - Juice
> - 很 (hěn) - Very; quite
> - 好 (hǎo) - Good
> - 喝 (hē) - to drink
> So, when you put these characters together:
> - 果汁 (guǒ zhī) means "fruit juice."
> - 很 (hěn) is an adverb that intensifies the adjective that follows. When used before an adjective, it indicates a high degree of something, commonly translated as "very" or "quite" in English.
> - 好喝 (hǎo hē) combines "good" (好 hǎo) and "to drink" (喝 hē), which together mean "tasty" or "good to drink."
> So, the sentence 果汁很好喝 translates to "The fruit juice is very tasty" or more directly, "Fruit juice is very good to drink." It's a simple sentence structure expressing that the speaker finds the fruit juice to be quite delicious.
It does idioms too:
> > I’m learning Mandarin, can you break this sentence into individual hanzi and explain it? 吃醋
> Sure, I can help with that. The sentence "吃醋" consists of two characters: "吃" and "醋".
> - 吃 (chī): This character means "to eat" or "to consume".
> - 醋 (cù): This character means "vinegar".
> However, when put together as "吃醋", the phrase doesn't literally mean "eat vinegar". In Chinese, "吃醋" is an idiomatic expression that means to be jealous or envious, usually in the context of a romantic relationship. It can be translated to feeling "sour" over someone's interaction with others, hence the metaphor of "eating vinegar". This phrase showcases how Mandarin often uses vivid imagery to encapsulate emotions and situations.
Even going down to a locally running Mistral 7b gives pretty good results, although it sometimes makes minor mistakes or doesn’t give as thorough an explanation as the larger models. Still very useful for my stage though, where I’m mostly just trying to remember something that isn’t quite fully memorised yet, or exploring what’s adjacent to my current knowledge.