ChatGPT vs. a Real Japanese Teacher

In yesterday's WTF entry, I detailed how I would use ChatGPT as a foreign language tutor. Thus, I wanted to see what my Japanese teacher thought about this ChatGPT tutor idea concept:

As you can see in the video, ChatGPT's output is nowhere near perfect (but we already knew that). Still, it was quite promising to see my Japanese teacher agree that studying the vocabulary output from ChatGPT is a worthwhile training exercise.

Language Learning ChatGPT Prompts

Enter this into ChatGPT. Replace any variables in [square brackets]

I'm learning [foreign language]. Can you write me a list of the most essential words to navigate a restaurant translated into English and [foreign language]?

This should provide you with relevant vocabulary words in your target language.  

I want you to act as an English translator, spelling corrector and improver. I will speak to you in any language and you will detect the language, translate it and answer in the corrected and improved version of my text, in English. I want you to replace my simplified A0-level words and sentences with more beautiful and elegant, upper level English words and sentences. Keep the meaning same, but make them more literary. I want you to only reply the correction, the improvements and nothing else, do not write explanations. My first sentence is "[sentence in foreign language]"

This is @f's interactive way to learn a language instead of using Grammarly or Google Translate.

What's The Future?

I will incorporate ChatGPT's themed vocabulary lists into my everyday language studies. As for the future, I think there's truly an opportunity for a niche Large Language Model (LLM) that's specific to foreign language learning and translation. This would, in theory, make applications like ChatGPT better for foreign language tutoring.

Obviously, I'm not the only one thinking in that direction since a 2021 video from LINE (a prominent Japanese company) showcases their LLM for GPT-3. The crazier thing is this video only has 221 views at the time of publishing!