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0 pointsshanusmagnus3y ago0 comments

The OA, and your comment, made me very excited at the prospect of building a kickass AI-assisted language-learning suite. I think interactive writing is a great foundational abstraction, and your description -- of reading a bunch of examples in the native language saying similar things -- would be a beautiful way to realize it: a write, read, write, read, write REPL. Mix in spaced rep and conversation with a partner (conversations would be much less tedious as part of this loop) and you have a language learning hyper-accelerator.

I'm what people in the Midwest [1] call "good with languages" in that I have learned a host of them to intermediate level, and then run aground on getting to advanced, which I think of as the ability to express yourself colloquially and elegantly on any random topic. An IDE like we're talking about would be a godsend, not least because it would speed things up between ten and a hundred-fold.

Argh, I'm tempted to quit my fucking job and try to make this exist, though I'm not qualified to build it. Maybe someone else will do something comparable -- definitely a "take my money" example :)

[1] I mention being from the Midwest bc, when I was growing up, average small-town people lacked any real access or exposure to (or motivation to acquire) other languages. When I got old enough to travel (also not a thing generally done in my social setting), running into people fluent in 4 languages just by accident of birth, would always make me so jealous :/

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thaumasiotes3y ago

> I have learned a host of them to intermediate level, and then run aground on getting to advanced, which I think of as the ability to express yourself colloquially and elegantly on any random topic.

If this is your standard, then to within rounding error, 0% of people have reached an "advanced" level in their own native language(s). Elegance is difficult.

(Though some people do seem to believe in a similar standard. My sister grew up in the United States, in an exclusively English-speaking household, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She joined the state department and took their English ability test (I assume for fun). She scored less than fluent - according to the rubric, not qualified to talk to Anglophone college graduates.

I can attest personally that college graduates don't seem to mind if you, as a foreigner, don't know the specialized vocabulary they learned in college.)

shanusmagnusOP3y ago

I think you and I have a different notion of what "elegance" means. To me, it's not that high a bar. A native speaker who reads for fun and cares about self-expression generally achieves it. It does, however, prove a high bar for a non-native speaker in my experience.

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