by jamesdutc | 2025-05-07 21:57:12+00:00
Congratulations to the creators for successfully releasing this product!

(I'm trying to start with a positive tone, since I have only negative things to say about the site itself. I want to make sure that I'm coming across a critical without coming across as mean.)

I spent a few minutes generating a couple of sample stories using their prompts for the pair that I'm most qualified to evaluate “English”→“Chinese (Traditional)” and just wasn't very impressed. Honestly, I think the approach is largely a dead-end.

Let's set aside that “Chinese (Traditional)” is not a language, and that someone with experience learning or teaching Chinese ought to know this (and, as I will argue, knowing this is critical to producing high-quality educational materials!) That the creators of this tool aren't particularly familiar with the languages themselves is probably much less consequential than that they don't really appear to be familiar with the pedagogy of teaching or learning languages.

One would anticipate that the languages that most learners want to learn are subject to broad market forces, and that, as a consequence, these languages already have a variety of high-quality, human-written primary texts and educational texts (many of which may even be free-to-access!) For the language pair I tested, this is definitely true, and I would encourage every learner to start with those materials (and to avoid anything AI-generated.)

(Of course, if I wanted to learn a less-common language where materials are hard to find this might be marginally useful—e.g., Telugu probably has more total speakers than Italian, but my local high school probably has an Italian class—but I would wonder whether the training set would be good enough to accurately reproduce the language. I suppose if I wanted to learn an endangered language, where they may simply not be enough native speakers to maintain a rich catalogue of written language, then someone could train an AI to reproduce this language to aid in learning, but a similar question arises as to whether this kind of preservation or reconstruction is sufficiently “faithful.”)

It's absolutely the case that AI tools are at a point where (for common languages) they are able to reliably generate grammatically accurate language, independent of its factual accuracy. Indeed, while I could spot fluency issues in the sample stories I reviewed (since, of course, “Chinese (Traditional)” is not a language,) I could not spot outright grammatical errors. (This is an impressive accomplishment for AI models!)

But this is really a solution looking for a problem (and, in my opinion, finding the most obvious but also least useful.)

Contrast these randomly generated story with the equivalent from a human-generated educational resource. In the case of a human-generated educational resource, the quality of language may actually be worse than than that in the AI generated resource (even in the face of sloppy AI writing tends to be!) In fact, in the case of Chinese (“Traditional” or otherwise,) this is absolutely guaranteed to be the case for an introductory text. Almost all introductory texts will be written in a very choppy, repetitive style: e.g., 「那隻狗很可愛。我養的狗也很可愛。」

(It's likely the case that even intermediate and advanced learning materials will not resemble actual primary texts. e.g., I was reading the news the other day and came across the sentence 「北捷重申，無論任何年齡，各車站閘門前的黃色標線內一律禁止喝水等飲食行為，除非是身體不適或母乳哺育」 which is perfectly appropriate for an intermediate learner… except 「閘門」 is simply not useful or appropriate textbook vocabulary!)

So why is the human-generated educational material better? Well, there's a lot of design to writing these kinds of materials. How do we teach and reïterate the most broadly useful grammatical structures and vocabulary? How do we teach this in a way that maximises retention? (And, often, how do we expose the learner to useful cultural background that will help them when they visit a region where the language is spoken?)

All of this is visible in human-generated materials, yet none of this is evident in these AI-generated materials. It is, in fact, this design that makes these materials useful in the first place. In the absence of it, we end up with vocabulary lists that define 「狗：dog」 next to 「呈現：to emerge」 where a human educator would align the difficulty of these terms to the order and process in which a human learner would learn them. Similarly, a human educator knows how to evolve a student's fluency with language and understanding of tone and register, taking them from 「媽媽: mother」 to 「母親: mother」 perhaps even strategically including 「媽咪: mommy」 or even 「阿母 a-bú: mother （台）」 to engage the student. (Real educators do this very often, and students tend to really like it when they get “fun fact”-style local flavour!) I have not seen anyone attempt to introduce any of this design into AI-generated learning materials, and I suspect this is why they always come across as being so bland and mushy. Instead, the AI-generated materials are creating only rote practice items (which is why their prompts typically include things like “limit the generated text to use only vocabulary as published in the prep materials for such-and-such language proficiency exam.”) This kind of practice is, indeed, useful, but it's debatable whether it's measurably more useful than just spaced-repetition with flashcards.

Now, contrast these materials with primary texts (i.e., written language artefacts produced for an audience of native speakers.) Primary texts are often very difficult to incorporate into language learning, especially for languages like Chinese. This is probably because at the introductory level, the materials simply aren't dense enough for an adult learner, and at the advanced level, probably because these materials are far too challenging given the amount of specialised terminology and vocabulary used. (There are, in fact, very appropriate materials that sit between these extremes, such as news magazines or short stories written for middle schoolers, but these materials can be hard to access.)

The benefit of the primary text is that it is very close to the actual goal of the learner: I really don't want to read a story about a lost dog, and I only do it, because with enough practice reading such drivel, I might eventually read ‘Dream of the Red Mansion’ or ‘Red Sorghum.’ As a consequence, what most learners will reach for are “graded readers” which are adaptations of well-known works with simplified language and grammar. I'm on the fence with how well AI can create these for us. On the one hand, there is a pedagogical and creative dimension to producing a good graded reader. The former may be possible to approximate with additional prompting (“use only vocabulary from this list; use only grammatical structures familiar to a learner at this tested level,”) but I'm not sure about the latter. The reader is probably losing a lot when we simplify Gandalf to ‘Run away now!’

So while I'm quite hopeful that AI technologies can improve language learning, this kind of tool just doesn't seem to add anything to what already exists and is already much better.

The approach is just too obvious. I think it's too focused on finding a way to adapt something we know that AI can do well (generate grammatically correct text) to something we want to be able to do more cheaply or effectively (teach language learners how to read) without really considering how to solve this problem.