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.
Yeah. I am definitely not saying one must spend money on tutors. You can learn French without tutor, actually. French is one of those languages that have fairly large amount of free or cheap high quality resources available online.
But, the learning writeups that lead with the "learning something new" part kind of feel better the those who put unnecessary emphasis on "canceled tutor". So, you get something inspiring like a book they can read now (and could not before), about podcast they understood (and could not before) or a little about successful small talk in French. I have no idea about what the author learned in what time.
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.
One of the cool things about LLM-assisted language learning that I have found is this:
Language is (for almost every adult) deeply personal. Even the best of teachers must be so nuanced for every error correction, repetition request, nudging, encouraging, etc. Why? Because the adult student is greatly affected by human feedback in this context.
This is one of the (many!) reasons why children learn languages (their first included) kinda fast. Their ego isn't involved.
Learning with a non-human, at least for me, is kinda cool as I don't feel bad telling it "look, I get it, don't ask me that again" and I don't take it personally when it says "that's not quite right."
I've got tons of experience as both a language student and a teacher, btw.
Can you please explain what you mean by distilling learning books and learning from it? Just passing in a chapter and asking the model to help you work through it?
Essentially yes. I would advise not to upload the entire book but a section to work on. You can make it a project and then set a calendar reminder, and hit / create your own structure. You can make a schedule and then do a chapter a day/week type of event.
It helps with speaking and talking. not writing. To me that is ok, I’m stronger learning writing and reading but having the AI enforce me to speak and not be embarrassed is fantastic.
For reference, I’ve passed JLPT N4, and can probably pass N3, until recently I had no true talking or replying experience just reading/writing. Whenever I’d speak, I’d stammer, stutter and overall was anxious. I get it sometimes in English too which is my native language but..
Going back to review previous books, chapters of language books or chapters of children books/intermediate books and manga and set it up as an interactive voice coaching session helped me enforce speaking and communicating in a natural sense. It was what I was doing on italki but then you run into Cost, scheduling and the same spend ten minutes to catch up and review minimum. If you schedule more, 2 hours or such it can get exhausting and can be harder to schedule unless you plan weeks in advance with a popular tutor.
Honestly helped a ton with the minimal amount of work I put into setting it up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
----------
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.
-------
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.
Oh, I'm not talking about using only LLMs, for sure. I am currently taking a college sequence (currently French 3), with textbooks, homework, and everything. 100% agreed on the value of traditional texts/flows. On the matter of LLMs being permissive with grammar, you need to use the tools specifically meant to check grammar. I use LanguageTool for everything I write to make sure my grammar is both correct and current.
LLMs are invaluable IMO for immediate feedback on your writing and speaking. I've started using French inputs for most regular interactions, even with things like Claude Code for my work and for all LLM interactions (I use Grok). Before I input into Claude Code, I check the grammar and content with LLMs. Tutors and traditional paths will not help with this.
The other sequence I'm starting to do is to have conversations as I take baby steps in speaking/listening. Agreed that talking to real French speakers is the best, but initially we tend to be shy because we're so bad, and using a non-human can put us at ease. You may be different, but IMO this is typical. And this post was about refining this via an app that adds spaced repetition, and I appreciate that.
Have you tried looking for a French Beginner Discord voice chat? Or a similar local club for an in person meeting in your area?
Tutors are not necessary. But this is a humanity / language arts problem. Communication with humans is literally the goal. Conversing with other similarly ranked beginners (with a moderator or teacher guiding the group) is among the best practice you can do.
Again, the point of public discussion with other humans is to find all the little mistakes and misunderstandings. The things that other humans find difficult with your pronunciation, rhythm or accent.
Tutors are simply the most expensive version of this available of live, one on one practice. It's a bad overall $$ value compared to class discussion or clubs but the human in the loop is perhaps the most important thing here for training yourself.
Again: it's the LLMs overly generous acceptance that I find problematic. When I talk in German at A2 level, other humans easily point out when I'm doing things in "English order" or other similar mistakes (which makes the sentence harder to understand in German).
But with an LLM, the LLM just understands broken German in English order or whenever I leave out a separatable verb or whatever. It autocorrects too much.
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!
It's hateful to read.
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.
Yeah. I am definitely not saying one must spend money on tutors. You can learn French without tutor, actually. French is one of those languages that have fairly large amount of free or cheap high quality resources available online.
But, the learning writeups that lead with the "learning something new" part kind of feel better the those who put unnecessary emphasis on "canceled tutor". So, you get something inspiring like a book they can read now (and could not before), about podcast they understood (and could not before) or a little about successful small talk in French. I have no idea about what the author learned in what time.
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.
One of the cool things about LLM-assisted language learning that I have found is this:
Language is (for almost every adult) deeply personal. Even the best of teachers must be so nuanced for every error correction, repetition request, nudging, encouraging, etc. Why? Because the adult student is greatly affected by human feedback in this context.
This is one of the (many!) reasons why children learn languages (their first included) kinda fast. Their ego isn't involved.
Learning with a non-human, at least for me, is kinda cool as I don't feel bad telling it "look, I get it, don't ask me that again" and I don't take it personally when it says "that's not quite right."
I've got tons of experience as both a language student and a teacher, btw.
Can you please explain what you mean by distilling learning books and learning from it? Just passing in a chapter and asking the model to help you work through it?
Essentially yes. I would advise not to upload the entire book but a section to work on. You can make it a project and then set a calendar reminder, and hit / create your own structure. You can make a schedule and then do a chapter a day/week type of event.
It helps with speaking and talking. not writing. To me that is ok, I’m stronger learning writing and reading but having the AI enforce me to speak and not be embarrassed is fantastic.
For reference, I’ve passed JLPT N4, and can probably pass N3, until recently I had no true talking or replying experience just reading/writing. Whenever I’d speak, I’d stammer, stutter and overall was anxious. I get it sometimes in English too which is my native language but..
Going back to review previous books, chapters of language books or chapters of children books/intermediate books and manga and set it up as an interactive voice coaching session helped me enforce speaking and communicating in a natural sense. It was what I was doing on italki but then you run into Cost, scheduling and the same spend ten minutes to catch up and review minimum. If you schedule more, 2 hours or such it can get exhausting and can be harder to schedule unless you plan weeks in advance with a popular tutor.
Honestly helped a ton with the minimal amount of work I put into setting it up.
We've all seen how LLMs write, imagine someone who talks like that.
C'est un véritable game-changer...
Non fromage, omlette.
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
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
----------
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.
-------
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.
Oh, I'm not talking about using only LLMs, for sure. I am currently taking a college sequence (currently French 3), with textbooks, homework, and everything. 100% agreed on the value of traditional texts/flows. On the matter of LLMs being permissive with grammar, you need to use the tools specifically meant to check grammar. I use LanguageTool for everything I write to make sure my grammar is both correct and current.
LLMs are invaluable IMO for immediate feedback on your writing and speaking. I've started using French inputs for most regular interactions, even with things like Claude Code for my work and for all LLM interactions (I use Grok). Before I input into Claude Code, I check the grammar and content with LLMs. Tutors and traditional paths will not help with this.
The other sequence I'm starting to do is to have conversations as I take baby steps in speaking/listening. Agreed that talking to real French speakers is the best, but initially we tend to be shy because we're so bad, and using a non-human can put us at ease. You may be different, but IMO this is typical. And this post was about refining this via an app that adds spaced repetition, and I appreciate that.
Have you tried looking for a French Beginner Discord voice chat? Or a similar local club for an in person meeting in your area?
Tutors are not necessary. But this is a humanity / language arts problem. Communication with humans is literally the goal. Conversing with other similarly ranked beginners (with a moderator or teacher guiding the group) is among the best practice you can do.
Again, the point of public discussion with other humans is to find all the little mistakes and misunderstandings. The things that other humans find difficult with your pronunciation, rhythm or accent.
Tutors are simply the most expensive version of this available of live, one on one practice. It's a bad overall $$ value compared to class discussion or clubs but the human in the loop is perhaps the most important thing here for training yourself.
Again: it's the LLMs overly generous acceptance that I find problematic. When I talk in German at A2 level, other humans easily point out when I'm doing things in "English order" or other similar mistakes (which makes the sentence harder to understand in German).
But with an LLM, the LLM just understands broken German in English order or whenever I leave out a separatable verb or whatever. It autocorrects too much.
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