There’s an interesting disconnect here, where the author of this piece apparently wants to learn French, and knows English, and they want to share how they went about learning French with an English audience.

But despite being a native English speaker, they couldn’t be bothered to actually write the article themselves. What’s the point of learning a language - any language - if you’re not even going to use your own words like an adult?

LLMs surely can help with language learning, but when they write posts like this, the zombie/body snatchers/borg effect is so strong as to be unreadable. Just write it yourself! You can do it! It will be better, please please stop generating bad boilerplate language with these fascinating algorithms, PLEASE!

I think the author would have had a better reception without the triumphant “canceled French tutor” framing. The juxtaposition of “learning a language” with “cutting out the human element” is very off-putting.

I am doing something similar but mix more simpler and didn’t even get to the stage of building an llm tool. I am just using ChatGPT to distill common learning books and set aside 1 hr thrice a week. I made considerable progress, to me and then I used Italki to confirm.

I used voice mode on ChatGPT to learn the tones for mandarin, and general vocab and sentence structure while for Japanese it helped me expand proper sentence structure greatly.

It sounds silly, but it helped reenforce a base structure that is helpful and having it confirmed by a tutor was nice. Best is I can really do it whenever. What op posted does sound next stage, and I can imagine it’d be a viable platform.

I don’t suggest notebookllm to make an audiobook, I tried and it was the most dryest speech I ever heard. It did sound convincing enough if you were to do a podcast for it and that is what it does.. but it was completely horrid for learning but maybe that’s just me.

We've all seen how LLMs write, imagine someone who talks like that.

Non fromage, omlette.

Yeah gender agreement is where it trips up most, in my experience. I started asking mine to flag every noun's gender before using it in a sentence, forces it to slow down and actually reason instead of pattern-matching. Cut down on the "le voiture" type errors a ton.

Seen this movie before. Rosetta Stone in the 90s, then Duolingo, now this. Difference is the tutor actually corrected your accent and caught mistakes you didn't know to ask about. Chatbot won't notice you're mumbling.

C'est un véritable game-changer...

Wow That Is Fantastic And I Am So Glad To Hear It, You Have Really Put In A Lot Of Effort!

This seems an odd choice if your ultimate goal is speaking French to people who know French

And as we say, _c'est bien de la merde_.

Watch movies and listen to people if you want grammar to stick. Languages are living things. Not something you practice in a bubble with Anki and Duolingo.

This was so obviously LLM-authored that I stopped reading after just a couple of sentences. The author here has done themselves a disservice - mastering complex written grammar is meaningless if you cannot speak it or recognize spoken language. Interacting with a real French person for a few minutes should have been enough to cement this.

Funnily the author already made a very basic French error at the end. Wrote "bon chance" instead of "bonne chance"

Yeah but that's kind of the point - it's a tool for practice, not a finished product. We ship stuff with typos in it all the time and users still find it useful. The bar isn't perfect French, it's "better than paying $40/hr for a tutor who corrects the same mistake five times."

I complain about LLM-slop a lot (see my comment history), but this one doesn't feel like one!

The only bit I thought could be LLM was:

> The gap in my tutoring setup wasn’t the quality of the instruction. It was two structural things.

Even here, the second sentence is quite weak, none of that stupid punchy sentence that LLM likes to copy from (probably) TED Talks because it thinks that'll make the text fucking profound.

"I, a person who does not speak French or understand its grammar, am convinced that AI has made me better at speaking French and understanding its grammar than a tutor would."

This just isn't a reliable source, even putting aside trying to measure language proficiency through memorising grammar.

I'm surprised by the pushback by some people here; I wonder if they're actually learning French (or another language) themselves or just reacting generally against use of LLMs vs. humans here (a common trend on HN). I am learning French, and LLMs have proven to be very useful for me. Great to see the author go beyond current LLM voice exchanges by employing spaced repetition; thank you! I'll check it out.

I learned French, now living in France. I took a course to pretty much improve my accent and to not rely on translation when speaking. Our teacher never spoke English to us since day one, using images instead to relay messages.

What really helped me enforce what I learned is talking to real people online. There are plenty of groups in Discord where you can have conversations with people of different backgrounds and personalities, where you can capture vocabulary used by French speakers every day.

LLM is like Duolingo, you cannot rely on it alone. The OP cancelled their French course for this. You can use it but make sure to have different active and passive learning methods.

There is a point where you just need to start talking to actual people. Spending 6 months in a country that speak the targetted language works wonder for example once you know the basics.

Aren't there language exchange meeting groups in your area?

German learner here.

Most of the German discord group is mostly annoyed at how awful LLM explanations and hallucinations are.

Communication and teaching is something that teachers and tutors are far better at than LLMs. In fact, most seem to agree that the 30EUR or $40 textbooks with well organized listening/speaking tests are leagues better than any LLM subscription. And it probably will take you months+ of daily work to go up a language level. (a2 to B1 or B1 to B2), if not a year++ if you are more casual at learning...

At best, LLMs are a tool for browsing the free web for other resources.

As a teacher they have several flaws:

1. They understand your broken grammar and work with you -- bad. Real native speakers will struggle with bad grammar and pronunciation. You the human need to feel this constantly so that you know where to improve. Feeling the instinctive disgust from the other human is part of what helps us know what to practice.

2. They fail at coursework. A textbook puts you on the proper course, already graded to the level you are on and with exhaustive layouts of the subjects you are expected to know.

3. They understand your broken grammar and converse with you without a full ability to explain why it's wrong. Yes, this really is big enough to mention twice.

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I'd say LLMs are a reasonable tool for maybe finding additional grammar resources (ex: another source explaining N-declension, or other subjects you know you are struggling with). But as a general guide??

They don't know what you don't know. You still fall into the beginner trap of spinning in circles. If you already know what to search for, LLMs can accelerate the process but in my experience all the already available cheap textbooks are better sources of exercises and graded listening/reading material.

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IE: if you want to get A2 graded German reading and listening, get something like Hueber Lesehefte / Sicherheit ist nur wins Carsten Tsara blickt nicht durch for like 10 EUR (.mp3 read along and .PDF).

Or the myriad of other graded readers already available.

Your test is simple. Just read and understand the book. It's A2 after all, if you believe yourself to be at A2 level (or are aiming to achieve A2), then just read A2 stuff constantly.

It's just the usual LLM stuff. Beginners get wow'd by the chat bot interface but ignore all the issues with learning with LLMs. And beginners also find the well trod path of textbooks and study to be boring. But at the end of the day, the textbook is a simple and consistently useful tool, while LLMs arent.

At the beginning of this blog I knew the author spoke regularly in French with at least one human regularly. When I stopped reading I was no longer certain they speak French with any humans. I hope they decide to speak to humans in French again someday.

Built something similar for Spanish last year. The trick that actually moved the needle was feeding it my Anki failure log so it generates new example sentences using words I keep missing, instead of random vocab. One gotcha: GPT-4 confidently invents wrong subjunctive conjugations for irregular verbs, had to cross-check against a real conjugation table.