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Hello! I have some input and questions and feedback - I have a deep interest in this topic. For background, I studied Japanese to a reasonable level of profici
by lmiller1990 4y ago
Hello! I have some input and questions and feedback - I have a deep interest in this topic.
For background, I studied Japanese to a reasonable level of proficiency (read novels, worked in an all-Japanese company for many years, passed N1, etc).
I found the hardest plateau to overcome was the intermediate ("I know a bunch of words, grammar.I can read most things given time, and have a basic conversation in a 1:1 environment about topics I'm comfortable with") to proper fluent ("I'm comfortable in group conversations, able to work around words I don't understand, not have to ask people to slow down, etc").
The most challenging this was always knowing if I'm correct or not, how correct, and if not, why.
When you are beginner -> intermediate, the validation curve is basically if they understand you, or not. Once you get pretty decent, upper intermediate/lower advanced, people can generally figure out what you are trying to say or mean, even when it's weird/unnatural. Getting feedback beyond this point is really hard.
What you are suggesting just sounds like a faster way to get to upper intermediate - not really the last 10$-20%, which is the hardest (upper intermediate to advanced, to fluent).
For this last step, I think the problem that needs to be solved is feedback that includes not just what is un-natural, but how it can be more natural and ideally why (sometimes the reason is "it just is", which is fine -- in this case just show examples that are similar that illustrate the common pattern).
A super basic example that illustrates this might be as described here: https://oshiete.goo.ne.jp/qa/7848587.html https://oshiete.goo.ne.jp/qa/7848587.html
O パンが食べたい
<> パンを食べたい
Both are grammatically correct, but the former is natural, the latter is weird. There is no real way to get this feedback without someone telling you, though, since everyone understands you either way, no-one is going to stop and point out your weirdness.
Do you think your tool can solve this problem? Ideally, I want to be able to write something complex, and have it improved - kind of like bilingual Grammarly, I suppose, but more aimed at semantic/natural language.
- solarmist 4y agoYes, this is a big problem and will require many tools to tackle. I see turning Parsnip into a language learning platform which can be incorporated into other tools and products. Including one like Grammarly in the future, but active feedback for language production is, as you mentioned, a much harder and more subtle challenge. I do thing tools like GPT-3 and the like make it achieveable though.