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.
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