Long rant. Skip to last sentence for tldr. First of all, big fan of EGB. Secondly, I appreciate being pi-lingual myself. I understand his pride and I think he did very well and he should count it...
Long rant. Skip to last sentence for tldr.
First of all, big fan of EGB. Secondly, I appreciate being pi-lingual myself. I understand his pride and I think he did very well and he should count it as one of his hard earned accomplishments blah blah blah. But this whole essay really rubbed me entirely the wrong way.
When children first hear the sounds of another language, they can’t help but wonder: What in the world would it feel like to speak that language? Such eager childlike curiosity might seem universal and irrepressible.
Perhaps Mr Hofstadter was not a typical child, or perhaps his experience is typical of children of immense privilege of which I would know little about. Speaking as an immigrant, with all the children I have come across, taught, was teased by, rescued from teasing, and (most intimately) remembering the child that I was, my experience have been that foreign languages first of all elicit the unfortunate human reflex to other : "to view or treat (a person or group of people) as intrinsically different from and alien to oneself."
The slightest accent gives you away: children are ruthless othering machines. To children, their world is complete and they are the most clever and virtuous souls in the universe -- all others are inferior and barbaric in the ancient etymological sense: "from PIE root *barbar- echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners". If one was introduced as their superior, and the child grants that it is so, then and only then will the differences become cute or cool or exotic or valuable. Status first, signs of status follows, not the other way around.
How many of our Hong Konger children marvel at the Indonesian / Thai / Philippino languages of their domestic servants, vs how many giddily imitate the "posh" accents of their teachers' and tutors?
As an immigrant, the first impulse from "locals" you will encounter is not wonder or appreciation or admiration, it is at best a "huh???" If you are lucky it is neutral impatience: I don't know what you are saying, so hurry up don't waste my time.
Today, though, it strikes me as possible—in fact, quite likely—that humans are collectively going to knuckle under and throw in the towel as far as foreign languages are concerned.
Millions of climate / economic /political refugees are having to learn to be fluent in many tongues as a necessity. There is no glory in their struggle, no fan club dinners, no bravos good jobs cute nicknames: theirs is the dance between passing the first phone interview and unemployment, of getting past government workers for legal rights vs fines or eviction or jail. They don't have the luxury to sit at home and read poetry and play with idioms; they've got mouths to feed. Why shouldn't they throw in the towel on this front when they are fighting on so many others already?
This essay's thesis is the same thing that's been said about every art and skill we have "outsourced" to tools:
He said, when X skill goes away, "then we will have lost a major part of what it is to be human and alive."
The fact is that this same thing has been said about using the slide rule, the calculator, the pottery wheel, writing, riding a horse bareback, weaving with a loom, using store bought paint, eating chicken you didn't raise and slaughter, chain saw, riding in a car.... they are replacing beautiful human Arts refined through eons that we should rightfully mourn when they disappear.
But to say, if we lose X, for any singular value of X*, then we would lose what it is to be human and alive, is utter horse apples. For nearly the entirety of humanity we have been mono-lingual peoples who travel to foreign lands infrequently and dwelled in two even less. Our mono lingual ancestors, as well as our immigrant parents who speak with "embarrassing" accents, are every bit as human as he is.
To me, this essay gets the same eye roll as lamenting how steam engined oceanliners will replace the majestic slave galley. We should appreciate and preserve the partial good, without placing the whole messy human affair on a mythical pedestal.
You make some great points that I wholeheartedly agree with. There are so many instances where a lack of good translations is a huge barrier to access. You mentioned government functions; there's...
You make some great points that I wholeheartedly agree with.
Millions of climate / economic /political refugees are having to learn to be fluent in many tongues as a necessity. There is no glory in their struggle, no fan club dinners, no bravos good jobs cute nicknames: theirs is the dance between passing the first phone interview and unemployment, of getting past government workers for legal rights vs fines or eviction or jail. They don't have the luxury to sit at home and read poetry and play with idioms; they've got mouths to feed. Why shouldn't they throw in the towel on this front when they are fighting on so many others already?
There are so many instances where a lack of good translations is a huge barrier to access. You mentioned government functions; there's also political organizing, understanding healthcare, or even basic navigation.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that "there's no glory in their struggle." Hofstadter calls AI translations a luxury... but in reality, the time and ability to treat language-learning as a hobby is itself a luxury. As I wrote in my comment – are people really going to stop learning languages because AI translation becomes available? I find it incredibly unlikely. There's still the dazzle of knowing x number of languages. And learning languages can be fun (for some, ha ha).
I kinda wanted to avoid the topic of whether AI would completely change the way we do things, because I feel like the conversation is somewhat played out. But I do want to say that I think the idea that AI will take away our enjoyment of doing things that we already enjoy is kind of ridiculous. Using tools to save time doing things we don't want to do lets us use that extra time doing things we do want to do (in an ideal world...). No one is stopping Hofstadter from learning languages, ha ha.
There were plenty of things that humans stopped doing because technology progressed, pretty much obsolete jobs. There are also languages that have gone extinct because no one learns them anymore....
There were plenty of things that humans stopped doing because technology progressed, pretty much obsolete jobs. There are also languages that have gone extinct because no one learns them anymore. Third generation immigrants can barely speak the language of their predecessors. All this is to say that when AI gets to the point of making translators obsolete, there will be way less translators around. However, indeed, this doesn't mean people will stop speaking languages. But it does signal a decline. Imagine sci-fi like Mass Effect, Star Wars, Star Trek, and a bunch of other media portraying a live multiversal translator. That's the future. Those who learn languages will do so and be hired to do so to improve the AI technology for this multiversal translator.
(archive link) A very interesting take from Douglas Hofstadter, who is probably best known for his book Godel, Escher, Bach. I can't say I necessarily agree with his take, but I can understand it....
A very interesting take from Douglas Hofstadter, who is probably best known for his book Godel, Escher, Bach. I can't say I necessarily agree with his take, but I can understand it. Language is inherently expressive, which is why good translations are as much of a product of the translators as it is of the original creator. A good translation can't come from a bad writer, in my opinion. He mentions at a point that when he was learning Italian, he wasn't only speaking Italian, but thinking in Italian. In my own experiences in learning a language, I find this to be somewhat true. There are aspects to grammar and culture that can't be mechanically translated 1:1, and it's up to the translator — which, in this situation, is ourselves, for our own thoughts — to determine what that really means. When I've spent time amateurishly translating from one language to another, I find myself stumbling over situations where something can be vague in one language but not in another (and therefore I have to determine for myself and guess at the original intended message).
I do think Hofstadter romanticizes the process of actually learning a language too much. He does acknowledge that the ability to quickly communicate without a huge language barrier is astoundingly convenient. Think about the universal translators in Star Trek, or Doctor Who. Of course in those shows, it's simply for convenience. But I also think about the story of the Tower of Babel, and how in it God sowed dissension by making it so people could not understand each other's languages. I think that AI tools for languages will largely help far more than they'll hinder, and I think that it is very unlikely that humans that want to learn languages will choose not to learn, simply because there is a convenient but imperfect tool. AI has made a lot of things easier, but humans still strive for our own satisfaction and ambition. Chess and Go are AI-dominated for the most part, but that doesn't stop humans from trying ourselves. We just use the AI as tools.
One way that AI has been helping me learn a language (Ukrainian) is by using it to create exercises, grade my grammar/vocab, and explain concepts to me over and over without losing its patience. I...
. I think that AI tools for languages will largely help far more than they'll hinder, and I think that it is very unlikely that humans that want to learn languages will choose not to learn, simply because there is a convenient but imperfect tool. AI has made a lot of things easier, but humans still strive for our own satisfaction and ambition.
One way that AI has been helping me learn a language (Ukrainian) is by using it to create exercises, grade my grammar/vocab, and explain concepts to me over and over without losing its patience. I always keep an instance of ChatGPT going, and I get confused by a phrase, I can ask it to explain it to me like a language tutor. Then, based on what it tells me, I will then try to use what it explains in practice to form short and simple phrases and words. In addition, sometimes I will ask it to provide me with vocab in a way that I can copy and paste into excel then import into Anki. If I am somewhere new and want to learn nouns and verbs related to my environment, I can explain where I am and what I am doing to get a better understanding of how I can talk about it later.
So on one hand, translation capabilities are really cool without learning a language. It might make people not learn the language, but I don't think this audience will likely learn anyways. But on the other hand it also helps the learning process by providing some basic guidance and lessons which really goes a long way.
I really want to caution against using ChatGPT as a language tutor. I'm in a few language-learning communities, and chatGPT answers had to be banned and explicitly warned against because it was...
I really want to caution against using ChatGPT as a language tutor. I'm in a few language-learning communities, and chatGPT answers had to be banned and explicitly warned against because it was giving incorrect explanations that looked correct. That being said, I think it definitely is a really promising use case in the future, for beginner-level learning, at least.
Oh absolutely, it can get things wrong. I'm far enough along in my studies to ascertain when it gives me a wrong answer, and my wife will also correct me immediately if I say something wrong. But...
Oh absolutely, it can get things wrong. I'm far enough along in my studies to ascertain when it gives me a wrong answer, and my wife will also correct me immediately if I say something wrong. But so far, the way I use it is fine because the concepts that I need explaining are the ones that have a lot of written material out there. I would never ask it to explain to me something at a B2 level, but if I need it to check whether I use perfective vs imperfective aspect, or the prepositions associated with different cases, it is nearly 99% right.
And of course I don't use it solely. It is just one tool of many that I have including tutoring 3 times a week, LingQ, YouTube, books, and published materials.
The best use case I found for GPT is to use as a smart reverse dictionary. Many times I can only vaguely remember a word or phrase, or might ask what verb usually follows this noun, or even just...
The best use case I found for GPT is to use as a smart reverse dictionary. Many times I can only vaguely remember a word or phrase, or might ask what verb usually follows this noun, or even just write the sentence with a blank in place of a word I can’t recall etc, and due to its statistical nature chatgpt is really good at finding out what I was thinking of.
That said, I would definitely not rely on it for learning about anything where I’m not sufficiently well-trained myself first.
At the A1 level, a lack of vocabulary will probably be the most limiting factor in your ability to understand and communicate in German, so I would highly recommend downloading an Anki deck If you...
At the A1 level, a lack of vocabulary will probably be the most limiting factor in your ability to understand and communicate in German, so I would highly recommend downloading an Anki deck If you haven't already considered using one. Personally I used this deck for A1. If you set an ambitious goal of 50 cards/day (I would start at a smaller rate), you could be finished with the entire Goethe Institute A1 wordlist in about a month and a half.
Oh yeah, I totally get that. I cruised through most of my subjects in high school, with German being one of the notable exceptions. Back then I thought the problem was the class or the teacher or...
Oh yeah, I totally get that. I cruised through most of my subjects in high school, with German being one of the notable exceptions. Back then I thought the problem was the class or the teacher or just the language, but of course now I know the problem was just me -- I didn't realize you need to put in actual mental work to learn a language.
In college I roomed with a straight-A student, who was a great role model for developing study habits. So the second time around I actually put in some effort to learn German, but even then I was really only try to make the grade, not learn the language.
Nowadays I live in Germany and wish I had studied a little harder! So I guess this is just a roundabout way of saying that you shouldn't dismiss learning a language simply because it's a requirement; you never know when it'll come in handy.
But let me just reiterate the power of spaced repetition. Anki really is that passive language learning shortcut I had expected in high school. It won't help with everything, of course, but it's much easier to parse a sentence when you already understand every word individually.
Sorry for the late reply, but I've been trying to think of other learning resources (in general, or for German?) and not much is springing to mind. For language learning, at least, comprehensive...
Sorry for the late reply, but I've been trying to think of other learning resources (in general, or for German?) and not much is springing to mind. For language learning, at least, comprehensive input is essential, but that's really a matter of how motivated you are to expose yourself to the language; it certainly isn't necessary for acing an introductory German class. Dino learnt Deutsch isn't too difficult (and each chapter includes vocabulary), but I found the stories to be a little boring. Currently I'm trying to increase my input by reading manga (Kleine Katze Chi should be fairly intelligible if you already have an A1 level understanding) and watching cartoons.
From the way you worded your previous comment, I'm guessing you're either a junior or senior? Honestly I don't really have any general advise that you haven't heard a million times already. What are you studying, anyway?
I also think he discounts the raw utility of people being able to communicate. Yeah, they're losing the "art" of it, but they're gaining the ability to make transactions and communicate things...
I do think Hofstadter romanticizes the process of actually learning a language too much.
I also think he discounts the raw utility of people being able to communicate. Yeah, they're losing the "art" of it, but they're gaining the ability to make transactions and communicate things that can be of incredible importance.
The reality is that learning languages is hard, and it's nice and all for a professor to say that you should spend a great deal of time to learn a language for all the abstract reasons, but people have things they need to do.
It's already too late. AI is growing at an exponential rate. By the time you're fluent in a foreign language AI will be fluent in most of the common languages.
It's already too late. AI is growing at an exponential rate. By the time you're fluent in a foreign language AI will be fluent in most of the common languages.
Long rant. Skip to last sentence for tldr.
First of all, big fan of EGB. Secondly, I appreciate being pi-lingual myself. I understand his pride and I think he did very well and he should count it as one of his hard earned accomplishments blah blah blah. But this whole essay really rubbed me entirely the wrong way.
Perhaps Mr Hofstadter was not a typical child, or perhaps his experience is typical of children of immense privilege of which I would know little about. Speaking as an immigrant, with all the children I have come across, taught, was teased by, rescued from teasing, and (most intimately) remembering the child that I was, my experience have been that foreign languages first of all elicit the unfortunate human reflex to other : "to view or treat (a person or group of people) as intrinsically different from and alien to oneself."
The slightest accent gives you away: children are ruthless othering machines. To children, their world is complete and they are the most clever and virtuous souls in the universe -- all others are inferior and barbaric in the ancient etymological sense: "from PIE root *barbar- echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners". If one was introduced as their superior, and the child grants that it is so, then and only then will the differences become cute or cool or exotic or valuable. Status first, signs of status follows, not the other way around.
How many of our Hong Konger children marvel at the Indonesian / Thai / Philippino languages of their domestic servants, vs how many giddily imitate the "posh" accents of their teachers' and tutors?
As an immigrant, the first impulse from "locals" you will encounter is not wonder or appreciation or admiration, it is at best a "huh???" If you are lucky it is neutral impatience: I don't know what you are saying, so hurry up don't waste my time.
Millions of climate / economic /political refugees are having to learn to be fluent in many tongues as a necessity. There is no glory in their struggle, no fan club dinners, no bravos good jobs cute nicknames: theirs is the dance between passing the first phone interview and unemployment, of getting past government workers for legal rights vs fines or eviction or jail. They don't have the luxury to sit at home and read poetry and play with idioms; they've got mouths to feed. Why shouldn't they throw in the towel on this front when they are fighting on so many others already?
This essay's thesis is the same thing that's been said about every art and skill we have "outsourced" to tools:
He said, when X skill goes away, "then we will have lost a major part of what it is to be human and alive."
The fact is that this same thing has been said about using the slide rule, the calculator, the pottery wheel, writing, riding a horse bareback, weaving with a loom, using store bought paint, eating chicken you didn't raise and slaughter, chain saw, riding in a car.... they are replacing beautiful human Arts refined through eons that we should rightfully mourn when they disappear.
But to say, if we lose X, for any singular value of X*, then we would lose what it is to be human and alive, is utter horse apples. For nearly the entirety of humanity we have been mono-lingual peoples who travel to foreign lands infrequently and dwelled in two even less. Our mono lingual ancestors, as well as our immigrant parents who speak with "embarrassing" accents, are every bit as human as he is.
To me, this essay gets the same eye roll as lamenting how steam engined oceanliners will replace the majestic slave galley. We should appreciate and preserve the partial good, without placing the whole messy human affair on a mythical pedestal.
You make some great points that I wholeheartedly agree with.
There are so many instances where a lack of good translations is a huge barrier to access. You mentioned government functions; there's also political organizing, understanding healthcare, or even basic navigation.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that "there's no glory in their struggle." Hofstadter calls AI translations a luxury... but in reality, the time and ability to treat language-learning as a hobby is itself a luxury. As I wrote in my comment – are people really going to stop learning languages because AI translation becomes available? I find it incredibly unlikely. There's still the dazzle of knowing x number of languages. And learning languages can be fun (for some, ha ha).
I kinda wanted to avoid the topic of whether AI would completely change the way we do things, because I feel like the conversation is somewhat played out. But I do want to say that I think the idea that AI will take away our enjoyment of doing things that we already enjoy is kind of ridiculous. Using tools to save time doing things we don't want to do lets us use that extra time doing things we do want to do (in an ideal world...). No one is stopping Hofstadter from learning languages, ha ha.
There were plenty of things that humans stopped doing because technology progressed, pretty much obsolete jobs. There are also languages that have gone extinct because no one learns them anymore. Third generation immigrants can barely speak the language of their predecessors. All this is to say that when AI gets to the point of making translators obsolete, there will be way less translators around. However, indeed, this doesn't mean people will stop speaking languages. But it does signal a decline. Imagine sci-fi like Mass Effect, Star Wars, Star Trek, and a bunch of other media portraying a live multiversal translator. That's the future. Those who learn languages will do so and be hired to do so to improve the AI technology for this multiversal translator.
(archive link)
A very interesting take from Douglas Hofstadter, who is probably best known for his book Godel, Escher, Bach. I can't say I necessarily agree with his take, but I can understand it. Language is inherently expressive, which is why good translations are as much of a product of the translators as it is of the original creator. A good translation can't come from a bad writer, in my opinion. He mentions at a point that when he was learning Italian, he wasn't only speaking Italian, but thinking in Italian. In my own experiences in learning a language, I find this to be somewhat true. There are aspects to grammar and culture that can't be mechanically translated 1:1, and it's up to the translator — which, in this situation, is ourselves, for our own thoughts — to determine what that really means. When I've spent time amateurishly translating from one language to another, I find myself stumbling over situations where something can be vague in one language but not in another (and therefore I have to determine for myself and guess at the original intended message).
I do think Hofstadter romanticizes the process of actually learning a language too much. He does acknowledge that the ability to quickly communicate without a huge language barrier is astoundingly convenient. Think about the universal translators in Star Trek, or Doctor Who. Of course in those shows, it's simply for convenience. But I also think about the story of the Tower of Babel, and how in it God sowed dissension by making it so people could not understand each other's languages. I think that AI tools for languages will largely help far more than they'll hinder, and I think that it is very unlikely that humans that want to learn languages will choose not to learn, simply because there is a convenient but imperfect tool. AI has made a lot of things easier, but humans still strive for our own satisfaction and ambition. Chess and Go are AI-dominated for the most part, but that doesn't stop humans from trying ourselves. We just use the AI as tools.
One way that AI has been helping me learn a language (Ukrainian) is by using it to create exercises, grade my grammar/vocab, and explain concepts to me over and over without losing its patience. I always keep an instance of ChatGPT going, and I get confused by a phrase, I can ask it to explain it to me like a language tutor. Then, based on what it tells me, I will then try to use what it explains in practice to form short and simple phrases and words. In addition, sometimes I will ask it to provide me with vocab in a way that I can copy and paste into excel then import into Anki. If I am somewhere new and want to learn nouns and verbs related to my environment, I can explain where I am and what I am doing to get a better understanding of how I can talk about it later.
So on one hand, translation capabilities are really cool without learning a language. It might make people not learn the language, but I don't think this audience will likely learn anyways. But on the other hand it also helps the learning process by providing some basic guidance and lessons which really goes a long way.
I really want to caution against using ChatGPT as a language tutor. I'm in a few language-learning communities, and chatGPT answers had to be banned and explicitly warned against because it was giving incorrect explanations that looked correct. That being said, I think it definitely is a really promising use case in the future, for beginner-level learning, at least.
Oh absolutely, it can get things wrong. I'm far enough along in my studies to ascertain when it gives me a wrong answer, and my wife will also correct me immediately if I say something wrong. But so far, the way I use it is fine because the concepts that I need explaining are the ones that have a lot of written material out there. I would never ask it to explain to me something at a B2 level, but if I need it to check whether I use perfective vs imperfective aspect, or the prepositions associated with different cases, it is nearly 99% right.
And of course I don't use it solely. It is just one tool of many that I have including tutoring 3 times a week, LingQ, YouTube, books, and published materials.
The best use case I found for GPT is to use as a smart reverse dictionary. Many times I can only vaguely remember a word or phrase, or might ask what verb usually follows this noun, or even just write the sentence with a blank in place of a word I can’t recall etc, and due to its statistical nature chatgpt is really good at finding out what I was thinking of.
That said, I would definitely not rely on it for learning about anything where I’m not sufficiently well-trained myself first.
At the A1 level, a lack of vocabulary will probably be the most limiting factor in your ability to understand and communicate in German, so I would highly recommend downloading an Anki deck If you haven't already considered using one. Personally I used this deck for A1. If you set an ambitious goal of 50 cards/day (I would start at a smaller rate), you could be finished with the entire Goethe Institute A1 wordlist in about a month and a half.
Oh yeah, I totally get that. I cruised through most of my subjects in high school, with German being one of the notable exceptions. Back then I thought the problem was the class or the teacher or just the language, but of course now I know the problem was just me -- I didn't realize you need to put in actual mental work to learn a language.
In college I roomed with a straight-A student, who was a great role model for developing study habits. So the second time around I actually put in some effort to learn German, but even then I was really only try to make the grade, not learn the language.
Nowadays I live in Germany and wish I had studied a little harder! So I guess this is just a roundabout way of saying that you shouldn't dismiss learning a language simply because it's a requirement; you never know when it'll come in handy.
But let me just reiterate the power of spaced repetition. Anki really is that passive language learning shortcut I had expected in high school. It won't help with everything, of course, but it's much easier to parse a sentence when you already understand every word individually.
Sorry for the late reply, but I've been trying to think of other learning resources (in general, or for German?) and not much is springing to mind. For language learning, at least, comprehensive input is essential, but that's really a matter of how motivated you are to expose yourself to the language; it certainly isn't necessary for acing an introductory German class. Dino learnt Deutsch isn't too difficult (and each chapter includes vocabulary), but I found the stories to be a little boring. Currently I'm trying to increase my input by reading manga (Kleine Katze Chi should be fairly intelligible if you already have an A1 level understanding) and watching cartoons.
From the way you worded your previous comment, I'm guessing you're either a junior or senior? Honestly I don't really have any general advise that you haven't heard a million times already. What are you studying, anyway?
I defaulted to ChatGPT. I haven't tried out the others ones too much yet
I also think he discounts the raw utility of people being able to communicate. Yeah, they're losing the "art" of it, but they're gaining the ability to make transactions and communicate things that can be of incredible importance.
The reality is that learning languages is hard, and it's nice and all for a professor to say that you should spend a great deal of time to learn a language for all the abstract reasons, but people have things they need to do.
Bring it on, I've been waiting for that shit since the 90s.
It's already too late. AI is growing at an exponential rate. By the time you're fluent in a foreign language AI will be fluent in most of the common languages.