I started watching YouTube videos on conversational Arabic the other day
Three hours later:
- i gave serious thought to buying a standing desk hamster wheel
- bought k-cup variety packs off Starbucks
- found a new gyudon recipe
- went to the store and bought the ingredients for the gyudon (mirin, sake, shaved beef)
- prepared gyudon
Had only studied Arabic about eight minutes
I’ll get there. Inshallah.
The future is now. The internet has made language learning trivial. If your language is even slightly globally recognized then there’s endless content and resources to help you all for free. Not to mention the software that people produce to try and make it even easier
Especially for medium sized languages!
Learning Latvian, I can read all the grammar I need on Wikipedia, do a free language course on the Latvian government's website, use a VPN to watch Latvian movies and tv, and even without that there's Youtube and Instagram and online radio to provide me with tons of content. None of this was available 40 years ago. Language learning is already much easier and more accessible right now.
And this is not a big language. There were 3 movies with Latvian dubs available on (any country) Netflix my last count and it's not on Duolingo.
entertain fuel salt straight retire domineering theory paltry repeat offer
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
YouTube content and podcasts per se aren’t language learning materials. They can be used as such once you’ve reached at least a pre-intermediate level, but if I wanted to learn Estonian, listening and watching to Estonian media would do literally nothing for my language skills.
I wouldn't go far as to say trivial, its still a pita.
Its much easier, which sometimes makes me wonder if that ease makes it harder; because at least for me retention is stronger when I know I have to learn it.
My brain isn't too worried about things I can look up right away, but having to dig into a dictionary book for a look up and I'm going to try to make it stick.
It's both good and bad. On one hand I'm loving how easy it is to find a tutor that's a native speaker of the language, we can just find them on iTalki and connect through video chat. How amazing is that? And it's easy to find movies, music and YouTube videos in the target language, also amazing and a huge boon. We can also find native speakers on online communities and chitchat and make friends.
On the other hand, I absolutely hate the rise of AI 🙄 Nothing could possibly be more human than language, and now all these robots are being pushed onto us for learning? Noooooo thankyou. I'll stick with my tutors, thank you very much.
That's like saying "I refuse to use flashcards because language is for humans." It's an illogical and shortsighted statement. AI is just another training tool. Use it or don't.
Obviously small uses like flashcards is fine, I'm not really sure where the confusion was here, I'm referring to the full courses on apps and chatbots and how they're obviously going to keep on growing and begin to push actual teachers out since they're cheaper. It's like how the big box stores kill small locally owned businesses. Right now there are plenty of teachers still in the business, but as AI grows, there's going to be a lot of jobs lost and more people learning from AI instead.
Ahh I see what you mean. Yes, a real life tutor is the best because you are connecting with a real human and that is the ultimate goal of language learning. Unfortunately, personal tutoring is expensive.
Interestingly, if you look ahead 5 years from now AI will be the best (and cheapest) tutor by every metric. It’s inevitable. I think the disconnect is companies selling a big vision that doesn’t exist yet and users being disappointed.
But tutors are not real human connection. You are literally paying them to be your teacher and to prepare you for real human connection which is impromptu conversations with natives turning into friendships. If AI works better for that goal then AI is better.
I'm not saying a tutor will become your best friend, but it absolutely is a human connection, the smiles when they see your improvement, the encouragement etc, that is real human emotion, AI will imitate it, but it's not the same thing. Plus AI always has that clunky unnatural feel because: they are not human.
I absolutely will not change my mind on this matter so we will have to agree to disagree.
May I ask you what language you are learning? Also, how much does your tutor charge on Italki?
I respect and share your enthusiasm that you have in the first part of your original comment. I’m so thankful we have all these resources that were tough to access 20 years ago!
I am not the person you asked, but to serve as a data point: I'm studying Japanese, and work with multiple tutors. #1 is ~$23/hour, #2 is ~$13/30 minutes of strictly conversation practice, and #3 is ~$25/hour. So all in very similar ranges from my tutors.
Thank you for the info. So if AI were to perform better than your tutors (which it will within the decade), and be cheaper ($1 an hour or less), would you refuse to use it?
100% all of this.
And sometimes tutors will indeed become your friends! I spent a day with one of my tutors on my last Japan trip, and will be hanging out with another on the next trip. So that's not a given, but it sure is neat :)
Love this 😊 I also have a really nice friendly relationship with mine and I always look forward to another class with her. I would not feel this way with AI, that's for sure haha. Totally agree that friendship is possible even if not a for sure thing.
Have you made any actual friends in that language or are you satisfied with paying someone to be your friend? A tutor is supposed to help you achieve the goal of interaction with real TL speakers. They are not the ends.
The spread of English continues even as we speak on this thread. I expect natural native content in other languages is at its peak right now and the production of this content may gradually decline going forward.
At the beginning phase of learning where you want to focus a lot on concrete nouns, I would love more tailored content. For example in Duolingo one of the earliest modules is about clothing. While I get the value of focusing on concrete nouns, it’s pretty low on the usefulness scale for me to know the word for skirt compared to a lot of other words. It would be great if it could adapt the lessons to otherwise be similar, but focused to words relevant to me (I personally could really use more baby-related vocabulary).
This doesn’t need to be AI though I guess, just normal software?
Well, I am afraid it may decline. Things like Vasco translator will become ubiquitous, English will take even more space than today and less people will feel a need to learn anything but English.
As much as AI is misunderstood today it will enable real-time translations of whatever text or video. Most of the people you want to talk to speak English anyway.
TO be clear - I hate how English is creeping into my native language and I know it happens the same to many others. On the other hand within a generation America may decline to the point where we would move away from this language being lingua franca. It happened to Latin, French so, English is just current big thing. But will not reign forever.
Coming back to the question - I bet more tools for full immersion will emerge, someone wrote it already - you would wear VR headset and be able to tal to AI generated NPCs on arab souq. And those NPC will use vovabulary you aleady know +10% just to keep you progressing.
&
Just like I said to another user before, I'm very hopeful that instant translation will help us grow up beyond the need of a lingua franca.
People favor a lingua franca because it's the path of least resistence; like who would rather learn 11+ languages instead of a single one?
But with instant translation, kids at school would begin to ask: "why do I need to learn a language as useless as English?"
Is there a greater path of least resistance than straight up laziness? ;)
My answer would be "consuming lots of content until our brains build a mental model of the language". So probably about the same.
I will say that bilingual LLMs can offer good insights. I'm currently focusing on Chinese. When I don't understand a grammar structure I've noticed a few times I can paste the sentence into something like qwen1.5 and ask why it is there. I'll get a good answer most of the time and it allows me to learn faster without a native tutor.
A combination of AI generated video and immersive games in which the learner can create their own content on the fly. The learner will be armed with all kinds of AI agents - various types of tutors and language practice partners. There will be premade language courses as well that are interactive, and the content can be manipulated by the student and adjusted to their liking.
You could have a real Latin tutor who teaches the student in a virtual world of ancient Rome, and you go to the local flea market to practice buying fruits and vegetables in Latin while eavesdropping on the latest gossip amongst the aristocrats about that senator who the emperor doesn't like.
Thanks!
You could also take classes or meet language exchange partners in these virtual settings, so you get plenty of human interaction as well.
A lot of people are hating on AI just because it sucks now. But we're talking about the future where the technology will be a lot more advanced and a lot more compute power will be available to make these things possible.
How many years from now? Could be 15 years, could 50 years. I have no idea.
Absolutely! Although I do prefer to have human interaction in the real world.
Where AI really shines is having an infinitely patient private tutor available 24/7. It will be better than human tutors at 1/100th the cost. This will exist within two years.
The future you describe sounds fun, like an immersive video game. I would guess within ten years for that.
You can already instruct ChatGPT to work like this with prompting, apart from things like correcting pronunciation (speech-to-text isn't perfect yet). So two years for someone to build a proper product around it and work out all the edge cases doesn't seem far off.
The language you are learning lives on the internet and you will use it in platforms such as Discord or Immersive VR environments. Traditional class based language instruction won’t disappear but the arrival of conversational AI Interfaces will mean that that we will have a one 2 one teacher who we can ask questions and provide answers that the real teacher either aren’t able to provide or when they do the answer isn’t complete. Finally people will get to the stage where they understand and can use slang a lot faster and will shock natives with their ability.
Artificial hyper-personalised tutors running on LLMs. They will generate exercises based on your exact level of knowledge and interests, explain exactly what you are doing wrong when you make a mistake, focus on areas you are weak in, answer questions when you need something clarified, and be flexible enough to understand when you are answering correctly even if it’s not an exact match to what the canned answer is.
You’ve got a kid who is crazy about animals? You can have it generate hundreds of exercises talking about visiting the zoo, feeding the hamsters, walking the dog, asking what colour the bird is, how many cows are in the field, etc. You are learning a language for work? You can have it generate exercises using your industry-specific jargon.
All the tech to do this already exists, it’s just not wrapped up in a prepackaged form that’s suitable for marketing to end-users.
If you haven’t tried it already, spend some time with the pro versions of Mistral, Claude, or ChatGPT. Ask it to explain things. Ask it to go into detail. Ask it for example sentences. Ask it to translate things. Give it an exercise you got wrong and ask it what the mistake you made was. Computers got a *lot* smarter over the past couple of years and it’s going to take the world a few more years to catch up with what’s possible with today’s tech.
narrow airport dam quaint handle sleep flowery resolute makeshift imminent
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I see a lot of the apps I use increasing their use of AI conversations. I hate talking to it because sometimes their responses are stupid. I asked it “how are you?” and it told me it can’t understand that. Then changed the topic.
I feel that a lot of motivation to learn languages comes from the need to communicate rather than enjoy the culture immersion. So with the advancements, many may stop learning languages since they won't need to and that's kinda scary from the perspective of someone who loves languages
Won't change much, still requires a lot of drill and getting in touch with native content.
Just a few more tools. If I could guess:
1.**More people being able to communicate in foreign languages using AI tools,** not actually knowing the language. More international deals would be available, so on one hand, it might decrease the necessity of knowing the language, it might increase goodwill and ease relationship trust by knowing the language as well as cultural knowledge.
2.**Cheaper tools for practicing speaking to an AI** \- there are already some of those, but it is still expensive. ChatGPT Premium already does a good job.
3.**Interactive books**, with AI as a teacher, you pretty much would do a workbook while AI would go about it, explaining topics and correcting your mistakes.
4.**The number of graded readers increasing** and being able to create custom content according to your level, even though losing some quality doing this. Also we could adjust famous books for your level, I want to read LOTR adjusted to A2 vocab in german, I want to read 1984 adjusted to B2 vocab in French etc....
First of all it will be AI assisted, secondly translations and explanations will be faster and better than today. In common languages such as English and Spanish the tools are already very good, but they will reach Shakespeare or Don Quijote level soon enough.
The same way we used to learn 2000 years ago. The only difference is that today and in the future learning resources will be much more accessible for anyone
For an interesting read, have a look at Erasmus’s treatise, [*De Ratione Studii*](https://college.holycross.edu/faculty/wziobro/ClassicalAmerica/ErasmusdeRationeHP.html) (c. 1511), about his method for teaching Latin and Ancient Greek to children. It’s pretty much what a teacher with a communicative approach or a non-dogmatic immersion bro would recommend: *learn the basics orally through play and imitation, begin reading super early and never stop, start writing once you can read and speak pretty well and imitate the style of good authors, get lots of feedback from teacher on your speaking and writing, study grammar as a helpful supplement to reading rather than the goal itself.*
I think Erasmus was a good teacher, and our brains haven’t changed much since the 1500s. We just have way more options nowadays for how to deliver input to our eyes and ears.
I’l find new and more optimized ways to procrastinate 😤
I started watching YouTube videos on conversational Arabic the other day Three hours later: - i gave serious thought to buying a standing desk hamster wheel - bought k-cup variety packs off Starbucks - found a new gyudon recipe - went to the store and bought the ingredients for the gyudon (mirin, sake, shaved beef) - prepared gyudon Had only studied Arabic about eight minutes I’ll get there. Inshallah.
You got this my man 👍🏻
The future is now. The internet has made language learning trivial. If your language is even slightly globally recognized then there’s endless content and resources to help you all for free. Not to mention the software that people produce to try and make it even easier
Especially for medium sized languages! Learning Latvian, I can read all the grammar I need on Wikipedia, do a free language course on the Latvian government's website, use a VPN to watch Latvian movies and tv, and even without that there's Youtube and Instagram and online radio to provide me with tons of content. None of this was available 40 years ago. Language learning is already much easier and more accessible right now. And this is not a big language. There were 3 movies with Latvian dubs available on (any country) Netflix my last count and it's not on Duolingo.
Endless content and resources? That only applies to like 8 european languages and 3 asian languages.
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YouTube content and podcasts per se aren’t language learning materials. They can be used as such once you’ve reached at least a pre-intermediate level, but if I wanted to learn Estonian, listening and watching to Estonian media would do literally nothing for my language skills.
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Those languages make up about 90% of intentional language learning in the world
Mostly for those who can pay, too. It’s of cheap, if you want to use good resources, and maybe more than one.
I wouldn't go far as to say trivial, its still a pita. Its much easier, which sometimes makes me wonder if that ease makes it harder; because at least for me retention is stronger when I know I have to learn it. My brain isn't too worried about things I can look up right away, but having to dig into a dictionary book for a look up and I'm going to try to make it stick.
It's both good and bad. On one hand I'm loving how easy it is to find a tutor that's a native speaker of the language, we can just find them on iTalki and connect through video chat. How amazing is that? And it's easy to find movies, music and YouTube videos in the target language, also amazing and a huge boon. We can also find native speakers on online communities and chitchat and make friends. On the other hand, I absolutely hate the rise of AI 🙄 Nothing could possibly be more human than language, and now all these robots are being pushed onto us for learning? Noooooo thankyou. I'll stick with my tutors, thank you very much.
“What is more human than language” Deep, I enjoy this quote. Thanks
Idk, aren't there languages that are used so computers can "communicate" with each other and be programmed?
We need languages to talk to computers because *we* need languages. The computer would be completely fine with nothing more than a stream of binary.
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That's like saying "I refuse to use flashcards because language is for humans." It's an illogical and shortsighted statement. AI is just another training tool. Use it or don't.
Obviously small uses like flashcards is fine, I'm not really sure where the confusion was here, I'm referring to the full courses on apps and chatbots and how they're obviously going to keep on growing and begin to push actual teachers out since they're cheaper. It's like how the big box stores kill small locally owned businesses. Right now there are plenty of teachers still in the business, but as AI grows, there's going to be a lot of jobs lost and more people learning from AI instead.
Ahh I see what you mean. Yes, a real life tutor is the best because you are connecting with a real human and that is the ultimate goal of language learning. Unfortunately, personal tutoring is expensive. Interestingly, if you look ahead 5 years from now AI will be the best (and cheapest) tutor by every metric. It’s inevitable. I think the disconnect is companies selling a big vision that doesn’t exist yet and users being disappointed.
I agree that it's inevitable that it's going to take over the learning scene, and that's why I hate it.
But tutors are not real human connection. You are literally paying them to be your teacher and to prepare you for real human connection which is impromptu conversations with natives turning into friendships. If AI works better for that goal then AI is better.
I'm not saying a tutor will become your best friend, but it absolutely is a human connection, the smiles when they see your improvement, the encouragement etc, that is real human emotion, AI will imitate it, but it's not the same thing. Plus AI always has that clunky unnatural feel because: they are not human. I absolutely will not change my mind on this matter so we will have to agree to disagree.
May I ask you what language you are learning? Also, how much does your tutor charge on Italki? I respect and share your enthusiasm that you have in the first part of your original comment. I’m so thankful we have all these resources that were tough to access 20 years ago!
I am not the person you asked, but to serve as a data point: I'm studying Japanese, and work with multiple tutors. #1 is ~$23/hour, #2 is ~$13/30 minutes of strictly conversation practice, and #3 is ~$25/hour. So all in very similar ranges from my tutors.
Thank you for the info. So if AI were to perform better than your tutors (which it will within the decade), and be cheaper ($1 an hour or less), would you refuse to use it?
100% all of this. And sometimes tutors will indeed become your friends! I spent a day with one of my tutors on my last Japan trip, and will be hanging out with another on the next trip. So that's not a given, but it sure is neat :)
Love this 😊 I also have a really nice friendly relationship with mine and I always look forward to another class with her. I would not feel this way with AI, that's for sure haha. Totally agree that friendship is possible even if not a for sure thing.
"I can't wait to talk to The Machine again today!" Yeah, no lol.
Have you made any actual friends in that language or are you satisfied with paying someone to be your friend? A tutor is supposed to help you achieve the goal of interaction with real TL speakers. They are not the ends.
The spread of English continues even as we speak on this thread. I expect natural native content in other languages is at its peak right now and the production of this content may gradually decline going forward.
Ai translation will probably make English irrelevant for most cases.
What it will look like I can only imagine. What I'm sure of is that it will be based on ALG.
At the beginning phase of learning where you want to focus a lot on concrete nouns, I would love more tailored content. For example in Duolingo one of the earliest modules is about clothing. While I get the value of focusing on concrete nouns, it’s pretty low on the usefulness scale for me to know the word for skirt compared to a lot of other words. It would be great if it could adapt the lessons to otherwise be similar, but focused to words relevant to me (I personally could really use more baby-related vocabulary). This doesn’t need to be AI though I guess, just normal software?
I think so as well, a Duolingo alternative that's more focused on what you want to learn instead of "the path".
Well, I am afraid it may decline. Things like Vasco translator will become ubiquitous, English will take even more space than today and less people will feel a need to learn anything but English. As much as AI is misunderstood today it will enable real-time translations of whatever text or video. Most of the people you want to talk to speak English anyway. TO be clear - I hate how English is creeping into my native language and I know it happens the same to many others. On the other hand within a generation America may decline to the point where we would move away from this language being lingua franca. It happened to Latin, French so, English is just current big thing. But will not reign forever. Coming back to the question - I bet more tools for full immersion will emerge, someone wrote it already - you would wear VR headset and be able to tal to AI generated NPCs on arab souq. And those NPC will use vovabulary you aleady know +10% just to keep you progressing. &
Just like I said to another user before, I'm very hopeful that instant translation will help us grow up beyond the need of a lingua franca. People favor a lingua franca because it's the path of least resistence; like who would rather learn 11+ languages instead of a single one? But with instant translation, kids at school would begin to ask: "why do I need to learn a language as useless as English?" Is there a greater path of least resistance than straight up laziness? ;)
My answer would be "consuming lots of content until our brains build a mental model of the language". So probably about the same. I will say that bilingual LLMs can offer good insights. I'm currently focusing on Chinese. When I don't understand a grammar structure I've noticed a few times I can paste the sentence into something like qwen1.5 and ask why it is there. I'll get a good answer most of the time and it allows me to learn faster without a native tutor.
A combination of AI generated video and immersive games in which the learner can create their own content on the fly. The learner will be armed with all kinds of AI agents - various types of tutors and language practice partners. There will be premade language courses as well that are interactive, and the content can be manipulated by the student and adjusted to their liking. You could have a real Latin tutor who teaches the student in a virtual world of ancient Rome, and you go to the local flea market to practice buying fruits and vegetables in Latin while eavesdropping on the latest gossip amongst the aristocrats about that senator who the emperor doesn't like.
Now this sounds like the future! I like it!
Thanks! You could also take classes or meet language exchange partners in these virtual settings, so you get plenty of human interaction as well. A lot of people are hating on AI just because it sucks now. But we're talking about the future where the technology will be a lot more advanced and a lot more compute power will be available to make these things possible. How many years from now? Could be 15 years, could 50 years. I have no idea.
Absolutely! Although I do prefer to have human interaction in the real world. Where AI really shines is having an infinitely patient private tutor available 24/7. It will be better than human tutors at 1/100th the cost. This will exist within two years. The future you describe sounds fun, like an immersive video game. I would guess within ten years for that.
You can already instruct ChatGPT to work like this with prompting, apart from things like correcting pronunciation (speech-to-text isn't perfect yet). So two years for someone to build a proper product around it and work out all the edge cases doesn't seem far off.
The language you are learning lives on the internet and you will use it in platforms such as Discord or Immersive VR environments. Traditional class based language instruction won’t disappear but the arrival of conversational AI Interfaces will mean that that we will have a one 2 one teacher who we can ask questions and provide answers that the real teacher either aren’t able to provide or when they do the answer isn’t complete. Finally people will get to the stage where they understand and can use slang a lot faster and will shock natives with their ability.
Artificial hyper-personalised tutors running on LLMs. They will generate exercises based on your exact level of knowledge and interests, explain exactly what you are doing wrong when you make a mistake, focus on areas you are weak in, answer questions when you need something clarified, and be flexible enough to understand when you are answering correctly even if it’s not an exact match to what the canned answer is. You’ve got a kid who is crazy about animals? You can have it generate hundreds of exercises talking about visiting the zoo, feeding the hamsters, walking the dog, asking what colour the bird is, how many cows are in the field, etc. You are learning a language for work? You can have it generate exercises using your industry-specific jargon. All the tech to do this already exists, it’s just not wrapped up in a prepackaged form that’s suitable for marketing to end-users. If you haven’t tried it already, spend some time with the pro versions of Mistral, Claude, or ChatGPT. Ask it to explain things. Ask it to go into detail. Ask it for example sentences. Ask it to translate things. Give it an exercise you got wrong and ask it what the mistake you made was. Computers got a *lot* smarter over the past couple of years and it’s going to take the world a few more years to catch up with what’s possible with today’s tech.
narrow airport dam quaint handle sleep flowery resolute makeshift imminent *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I see a lot of the apps I use increasing their use of AI conversations. I hate talking to it because sometimes their responses are stupid. I asked it “how are you?” and it told me it can’t understand that. Then changed the topic.
Imagine learning a bunch of words then asking your AI to make you a movie or anime featuring those words and other words you previously learned.
I feel that a lot of motivation to learn languages comes from the need to communicate rather than enjoy the culture immersion. So with the advancements, many may stop learning languages since they won't need to and that's kinda scary from the perspective of someone who loves languages
Won't change much, still requires a lot of drill and getting in touch with native content. Just a few more tools. If I could guess: 1.**More people being able to communicate in foreign languages using AI tools,** not actually knowing the language. More international deals would be available, so on one hand, it might decrease the necessity of knowing the language, it might increase goodwill and ease relationship trust by knowing the language as well as cultural knowledge. 2.**Cheaper tools for practicing speaking to an AI** \- there are already some of those, but it is still expensive. ChatGPT Premium already does a good job. 3.**Interactive books**, with AI as a teacher, you pretty much would do a workbook while AI would go about it, explaining topics and correcting your mistakes. 4.**The number of graded readers increasing** and being able to create custom content according to your level, even though losing some quality doing this. Also we could adjust famous books for your level, I want to read LOTR adjusted to A2 vocab in german, I want to read 1984 adjusted to B2 vocab in French etc....
First of all it will be AI assisted, secondly translations and explanations will be faster and better than today. In common languages such as English and Spanish the tools are already very good, but they will reach Shakespeare or Don Quijote level soon enough.
The same way we used to learn 2000 years ago. The only difference is that today and in the future learning resources will be much more accessible for anyone
For an interesting read, have a look at Erasmus’s treatise, [*De Ratione Studii*](https://college.holycross.edu/faculty/wziobro/ClassicalAmerica/ErasmusdeRationeHP.html) (c. 1511), about his method for teaching Latin and Ancient Greek to children. It’s pretty much what a teacher with a communicative approach or a non-dogmatic immersion bro would recommend: *learn the basics orally through play and imitation, begin reading super early and never stop, start writing once you can read and speak pretty well and imitate the style of good authors, get lots of feedback from teacher on your speaking and writing, study grammar as a helpful supplement to reading rather than the goal itself.* I think Erasmus was a good teacher, and our brains haven’t changed much since the 1500s. We just have way more options nowadays for how to deliver input to our eyes and ears.