17h ago

Is it getting less and less worthwhile to learn a language with the rise of AI?

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.

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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.
- Was going to say the same thing. Learning languages and doing puzzles are great ways to build and maintain mental acuity as you age. I have the puzzle part down, need to get off my butt and learn some new languages!
  
  Start small if you have trouble getting into it. If you know English, start with a Latin derived language.

There is so much more to knowing a language than literal translation.
You'll never understand memes using machine translation. Even if AI can do something like "explain why this image is funny", it just doesn't hit the same.
- I'm 51. Sometimes I ask AI to explain memes that are already plain English.
  Okay KnowYourMeme is a better source but these days AI will probably just read it from there anyway.

Personally, I think it's a great social experience. Once you move past the "I'm going to speak imperfectly until I learn," thing, you basically get to babel like a baby as an adult. People seem to love it, too. Everytime I tell someone I'm learning a language and they speak that language, they're always excited to help me practice.
I think it helps with your primary language too. A lot of languages are related, so learning about the structure of one can help you recognize patterns in another. Since you learn about new grammar rules in your native language first, it's especially useful if it's been a while since you've taken an English class.

This is a weird take. It seems to argue against not learning a language because of AI, but... also to not have any data that AI will lower the interest in learning languages?
Look, I have enough experience with monolinguals to tell you the arguments they were using were already bullshit. And we had more than decent machine translation before LLMs. If anything LLM translations, particularly running locally, are slower and less reliable than older alternatives.
Let's stop giving the tech more credit than it deserves until it proves itself, hm?
Also, most of that "language defines thinking" stuff is debunked pseudoscience. Learn a language to gain a new skill and open up a new culture without filters, but stop it with the exoticising nonsense.

Nope, I can tell you after 4 years in South Korea without speaking the language, the LLMs help to navigate websites and your phone a bit. But that's it. If you go to the bank or convenience store or if someone calls you you're still fucked.
- If you go to the bank or convenience store or if someone calls you you’re still fucked.
  Yeah, and even if you know the basics, you're fucked as soon as the conversation goes off the standard script. Then imagine going to a doctor with chatgpt.

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 stuff will never not be useful. All the ai tools in the world will not change that fact.

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.

Maybe in the future you could have an AI implant to take care of all translations while you're talking to people, and this idea has been explored in scifi many times. I think the babel fish was the funniest way to implement this idea in a story.
If that sort of translator becomes widespread, it would definitely change the status learning languages has. That would also mean you have to think about a potential man in the middle attack. Can you trust the corporation that runs the AI? What if you want to have a discussion about a topic that isn't approved by your local tyrannical dictatorship? MITM attack can become a serious concern. Most people probably don't care that much, so they won't learn new languages, but some people really need to.

I would say you answered yourself, it will take years before AI is good enough as a reliable real-time translation.
And the current LLMs have a tendency to hallucinate combine that with mistranslations and lack of the nuances you mention.
When I think of LLM hallucinations this Monty Python skit comes into mind:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=grA5XmBRC6g

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.
- I'm using local open source LLMs for translation like DeepSeek, Gemma, phi, etc. And they are very similar to ChatGTP.
  
  Couldn't tell you, I've never used any of them.
  
  What does your hardware setup look like, if you don’t mind me asking?
  I’m thinking of building something, but I don’t want to spend a fortune if I can help it. I run Lllama on a Mac Mini, which works fine, but I’m not able to run the bigger models on that.
- 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
  
  OpenAI doesn't really have a product in the business sense, which is the fraud and why I compare him to Holmes. But I get what you mean.

the opposite! ai is great for helping learn a language, part of my goal is to get away from english and us centric everything, if i just continue to watch other cultures in english i’m not doing anything really except watch more english language content

I appreciate the implied optimism on the future state of the world.

I learned languages for the same reason I learn most things: mere curiosity and the self satisfaction of improvement. I moved to France cause I knew French and I married a Brit cause I speak English, so if anything languages make things interesting. If you don't learn things simply because learning is fun and it's better to put something of value in your brain than nonsense then, idk, shame on you?

I am currently living in a country where I already know enough local language to do the taxes, but from conversational point of view I look like a 5 y.o. kid: sometimes people wait for me to finish poorly building a phrase while they already know what that will be.
How would even a greatest text to speech or speech to speech LLM help me? Would I pull out my phone and start talking through it at a job interview? If I was single, would I do it say "hey guuuurl!" into my phone if I wanted to approach a girl an a cafe? (well, that would be either really weird, or funny in a good way). My point is, it would still be a crutch, and I don't want to ba a person with a crutch, so I have to learn the language myself.
PS llms are helping me on a daily basis, because what google made for translating sentences, that openai and anthropic did on a more complex level - now I can ask: "the person said this - why did they say it in such a weird way?". It was a "question to a private tutor" territory before

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.

No.
Apart from everything else, also consider that it's just respectful to at least try and learn the local language of wherever it is you are going. Doesn't matter if it's on vacation or long term company deployment.
Also, LLMs are absolute garbage at picking up on things like subtle language-based jokes, for example.

That’s also kind of why I’m against a global language replacing all others
That's handy, because the whole promise of the AI babel fish is that we finally won't need an imperialist global language.
IMO you've got this entirely the wrong way round.

It depends on your goals.

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