As I’ve been learning Spanish these past months, I am almost compelled to create an LLM-powered language learning application. It is really hard to do spaced repetition without it turning into a grind, and the ability to create (and parse!) custom, idiomatic text programmatically could be an absolute game changer here.
They are also really good at answering questions about how language use and I haven’t noticed much (anything?) in the way of hallucination with frontier models.
Of course, a countervailing force here is that they are also stupidly good at translation, so the utility of actually learning another language is reduced.
They can explain nuances in a way that automatic sentence-to-sentence translation can’t, and you can give them enough context to let them know how to select the right way to translate what you want to say into idiomatic speech.
Of course, you will sound like an obsequious PR person if you don’t take steps to avoid that. 😛
