Language Learning

Interesting week for me. I did a grammar review using forms that I'd noted were giving me trouble during reading, and whereas five years ago I would have just read my notes three times and dug around for example sentences online, I decided to go full AI-assisted on JP to EN and EN to JP sentence translations. I've been using AI for a few months to bounce questions/concepts off of and it's been great almost every time, but this week was the first time it really dropped the ball. I went back and forth with it a few times on a particular grammar point because I was 90% sure it was wrong and eventually took it to some friends who were like, "yeah, this thing is hallucinating or misunderstanding." That led to an interesting conversation about when to and when not to use AI for grammar help. We decided it's probably not a good idea to have it teach you new concepts, and only use it for stuff at your level or for i+1 content so you're best prepared to catch errors. Would be interested to hear other constructive thoughts on it (although I fully understand the "you should never use it" camp).

I also tried out Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars, after deciding Animal Crossing was not for me (something like 20 million people love that game, but not me I guess 😅). I realized I don't think I can do video games without furigana yet, and the esoteric vocab might be a touch too much. Normally I could have tried a screen reader but the story is told on, well, cards, and so a lot (most?) of the text isn't level. The OCR tool I have can't handle that. It's too bad, because I think the concept is actually solid for learning, having plenty of repetition and the ability to easily flip back and forth through dialogue cards. I'll make a note of it to try late next year maybe.