Most people learn a new language in order to make headway in their career, be able to move abroad or just to speak with people of that country or consume their media. For people who learn for these reasons, will advances in AI and LLMs make learning a language more obsolete? Are there actually less people picking up a foreign language since LLMs opened to the public? What about the “human connection” which translators won’t be able to replicate?
I guess we’re still far off from real-time translation without delay in every kind of situation, especially since making sense of a sentence in many languages is very dependant on context or some word at the end of the sentence that changes the meaning of the first few words spoken.
I see learning a language as a way not only to communicate with different people, but to also learn a different way of seeing the world. That’s also kind of why I’m against a global language replacing all others: in a language, the culture of the people speaking it is intrinsically linked. Wiping out a language means wiping out the culture. People don’t think the same in English as they do in Mongolian. Even the concept of “time” can be different, depending on how it’s expressed in another language. Translators at the moment aren’t able to capture all these nuances and differences, even if they sometimes succeed.
Language is not just about getting your idea across. It shapes how we think.
But to answer your question, if you speak English, no.
Learning a language develops your brain in very weird ways, like nothing else can. There is some research which showed that bilingual or higher people had higher intelligence in general.
It can be done for self improvement and fun too.
I don’t think so, BUT the usefulness of it will vary depending on where you live and work.
I took five years of Spanish in school, last three were honors and I got college credit for them.
I kept it up on my own, but in my area, mostly useless. Hilariously, I’ve gotta be the one person who who’ve benefitted more from taking all that time to instead learn French; there aren’t a ton of Hispanic immigrants in my area. What there are…a lot of Africans, many of whom speak at least a version of French. (They’re from places like the DR Congo that are former French colonies. Fun fact: a small few elderly Somalis still speak Italian for the same reason.)
In the field I’m in now (private security,) any extra language skills will be useful. I speak English and Spanish, some Russian, some Welsh (from grandparents,) some Xhosa (South African,) and little bits of numerous others.
The Welsh is mostly useless today, I’ll admit, haha.
No man. It’s great for utility like traveling through a country and being able to ask people things or get something done. But it doesn’t foster real connections nearly as well. People will be far less likely to befriend you if you have to awkwardly talk through a translator all the time.
I for one started learning a new language just last week, after my hours of work have been reduced due to AI, because i finally have the time for it :-)
I am an ESL teacher. Generative AI is making things complicated for us, but it cannot replace learning the language. Right now, things like ChatGPT are presented as some sort of solution, but it is so far off and sometimes too obvious.
Like you mentioned, you think and reason differently in different languages. Plus, some people just love learning languages.
Aside: I am of the opinion that OpenAI and ChatGPT will disappear within 2 to 3 years. Their investors will abandon them leaving them drowning in debt, Sam Altman will face the same fate as Elizabeth Holmes. At some point his grift of asking for more money, hardware, electricity, water, etc., will be revealed.
Sam Altman will face the same fate as Elizabeth Holmes.
You might want to pick someone else besides her, her product was fraud, openai is used by millions of people every day
AI will never make a good enough translator. It can work for basic translations, but even then it has big failures. Assuming those small things could be resolved (but only to an extent since it could never be 100%), it still will fundamentally never be able to fully replace a person.
