Will most people stop studying Chinese now that AI is so good?

[Lu]

On 5/31/2023 at 4:35 PM, realmayo said:

Somewhere I saw something about a dating app where the AI learns how individual users interact with humans: then it simulates users interacting with each other, 1000 online dates in a couple of minutes, and reports back on the best results to the users.

Xia Jia has a story on that. Part "Matchmaking" in this several-part story "Spring Festival".

[Ledu]

I think that for “transactional” conversations, AI could be used more in the near future. For example, all duty-free clerks at airports could quickly use this technology.

 

But I think good professional interpreters can speak in a “relational” way. I think this comes from cultural knowledge. They can connect with the other culture and I don’t think an AI technology could really connect with another in a language. I think this is what makes top interpreters elite- they can connect with their clients quickly and smoothly. 

 

Also, there is a sense of Mastery, Joy and Purpose that can come from studying a language. Not to mention many may continue to have to study them for academic reasons.  

 

In the movie Wandering Earth 2 which is based on Liu Cixin’s books, the astronauts wear headgear and can speak their native language and the device translates into the other’s language. It appears that they can joke, relate and connect.  So perhaps one day technology will improve so that people can use a device and still connect in a way that is more than transactional. I just can’t imagine that someone could say a colloquial expression in Russian and a computer could translate it into a colloquial expression in Chinese. 

 

 

[Rotasu]

This post is odd as the title and poll title have different questions. I guess I shall join Jan Finster in the Yes vote to the question "If you knew AI could already provide very high quality real-time spoken interpretation and written translation, would be you less likely to study a new language?" because I did this.

 

I have already been a reader and have always wanted to get to the point in a language where I could read a novel with little dictionary usage. After a lot of dabbling, I found that I really enjoy reading Chinese. So I had the goal of learning Chinese to read novels. Not interested in speaking, listening or writing.

 

I got to the point of learning 2k words through reading graded readers until I got bored and tried out some short webnovels. I noticed that the extension I was using to translate some sentences I had trouble with was really helpful at showing what I was misunderstanding. Then one day I translated the whole chapter to see how well it did and it did great. Of course it wasn't perfect (some names didn't translate, rare awkward sentences, pronouns switched) but I understood the story and what was happening. After a lot of soul searching, I decided to drop learning Chinese and just machine translate (MTL as seen on novelupdates) the novels I want to read. With so little time now left in the day after work and other hobbies, why spend a hour trying to read a chapter that I can read in minutes by MTL?

 

Have I quit learning languages? No. But during my soul searching, I decided that I will only learn 2 languages in my life and one of them is a maybe if other life events happen. The language now is Japanese with a listening focus. And even in that language I'm using AI. The Whisper AI tool as been very helpful in adding subtitles to textbook audio. Again not perfect but it gets like maybe one word wrong per a 15 min video of combined audio tracks and it due to homophones. It's also very obvious when it happens because the sentence doesn't make sense.

 

Now if AI got good at "high quality real-time spoken interpretation" would I stop learning Japanese? I don't know. I have no plans to speak so I won't need it for conversations. Videos, games, tv shows, movies? No, I won't use it. Even now, if I'm playing a game that has English and Japanese voices, I'm picking Japanese 100%. I hate dubs so its either English subs or nothing. But some crazy people out there like dubs so I can see them not bothering to learn a language if dubs can be easily created.

 

 

[Moshen]

I'd like to revive this discussion if people can read a new article by Douglas Hofstadter in The Atlantic, where he eloquently discusses several of the exact scenarios we talked about in this thread.  I don't know if the article is paywalled - sorry.

 

Here is the link:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/the-terrible-downside-of-ai-language-translation/674687/

 

And here is a quote:

 

 

Quote

When I speak any language, as all my friends know well, I am always searching for the most appropriate word or idiom, frequently hesitating, stumbling, or suddenly changing course midstream; constantly joking by playing with ambiguity; having fun by putting on droll accents and personas, not to mention coming out with puns (some lovely, some lousy); using alliterative phrases; concocting new words on the fly; making accidental mistakes and laughing at myself; committing deliberate grammatical errors; unconsciously blending idioms and thus creating delightful new turns of phrase; tossing in words from other languages left and right; citing proverbs and quoting snippets of poetry; mixing metaphors; etc., etc. Speaking any language, for me, is a living, dynamic process that is permeated by my own unique humanness, with all its frailties and strengths. How is all of this wildly bubbling richness in Language A going to be mirrored in real time in Language B by a mechanical device that has nothing of those qualities driving it, that has no sense of humor, that has no understanding of irony or self-mockery, that has no awareness of how phrases are unconsciously blended, and so on?

 

[suMMit]

It is the entire world learning English, many starting from kindergarten, in China at least. That's what will make language learning unnecessary and obsolete, not AI.

[Moshen]

Quote

It is the entire world learning English, many starting from kindergarten, in China at least. That's what will make language learning unnecessary and obsolete, not AI.

 

Oh boy.  That is not the feeling I have when I call customer service for one of the companies I do business with and someone who appears to be speaking English but with a strong accent and unidiomatic vocabulary tries to help me.  So frustrating.  Sometimes I have to ask them to repeat themselves four times in a row until I get what they are saying.

[Lu]

On 7/14/2023 at 6:51 PM, suMMit said:

It is the entire world learning English, many starting from kindergarten, in China at least. That's what will make language learning unnecessary and obsolete, not AI.

That take is so wrong I don't even know where to start. Are there many Chinese who speak decent English: yes, certainly. But if you speak to a random Chinese person in China, odds are that person won't speak a word beyond 'yes' and 'no', if that. People with good English are the exception, not the rule, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon. And this goes for most of the world. Can you get around in English? Well, you probably won't starve, but you won't be able to have a conversation or do business without an interpreter.

[leonjust]

I want to make a foreign girlfriend, AI could help me talk with her , but AI couldn't help me fall in love with her.