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But as you yourself admit, you were at a high level already, so you know how to ask the LLM good questions. If you were a beginner with zero knowledge, you woul

by rchaud 1y ago

But as you yourself admit, you were at a high level already, so you know how to ask the LLM good questions. If you were a beginner with zero knowledge, you wouldn't have that advantage, so the LLM's ability to help you would be far less. How many ESL learners are asking ChatGPT when to use the past participle or present perfect tense?

nchmy 1y ago
Believe it or not, I have a high level of understanding of my native language as well - as surely most 2nd language learners do. You don't even need to know any grammatical terms (I barely do for English, and suspect most people don't either for their native language), so long as you can speak a language. Like, I don't have a clue what past participle or present perfect tense mean in either language. Nor do I particularly need to know them. Though, I'll admit that it would surely be easier to learn Spanish if I knew and understood the equivalent constructs in English. Case in point - when I was a kid and they taught us French in school, it was just an exercise in memorization rather than understanding, because they hadn't taught us the English versions. Apparently that's just what happened where I'm from for an extended period of time. Yet, I'm very significantly literate. Still, you just ask chatgpt "how do I say _ in Spanish?" and then ask questions with variations for subject, object, tense, etc. You obviously would start easy "how do I say 'I eat bread'", but can progress to 'I ate/will eat/am going to eat/had eaten/would have eaten/could eat bread' And you could eventually make it quite complicated eg "if you had told me xyz as you should have, I would have asked him about it. Now I am hoping that etc..." There's a huge mix of grammatical concepts in that (and I know very few of their names), and chatgpt would easily translate it and explain the concepts to whatever degree I desire. If I was sufficiently motivated, I am quite sure that chatgpt could rapidly and effectively teach me all English and Spanish grammar. Perhaps it would be a different story if learning something wildly different - eg Vietnamese. Yet, there's surely still similar constructs underlying it, since they all have to reflect the same world.

by rchaud 1y ago

nchmy 1y ago

Believe it or not, I have a high level of understanding of my native language as well - as surely most 2nd language learners do. You don't even need to know any grammatical terms (I barely do for English, and suspect most people don't either for their native language), so long as you can speak a language. Like, I don't have a clue what past participle or present perfect tense mean in either language. Nor do I particularly need to know them. Though, I'll admit that it would surely be easier to learn Spanish if I knew and understood the equivalent constructs in English. Case in point - when I was a kid and they taught us French in school, it was just an exercise in memorization rather than understanding, because they hadn't taught us the English versions. Apparently that's just what happened where I'm from for an extended period of time. Yet, I'm very significantly literate. Still, you just ask chatgpt "how do I say _ in Spanish?" and then ask questions with variations for subject, object, tense, etc. You obviously would start easy "how do I say 'I eat bread'", but can progress to 'I ate/will eat/am going to eat/had eaten/would have eaten/could eat bread' And you could eventually make it quite complicated eg "if you had told me xyz as you should have, I would have asked him about it. Now I am hoping that etc..." There's a huge mix of grammatical concepts in that (and I know very few of their names), and chatgpt would easily translate it and explain the concepts to whatever degree I desire. If I was sufficiently motivated, I am quite sure that chatgpt could rapidly and effectively teach me all English and Spanish grammar. Perhaps it would be a different story if learning something wildly different - eg Vietnamese. Yet, there's surely still similar constructs underlying it, since they all have to reflect the same world.