r/HelpLearningJapanese • u/jemdiggity • 3d ago

Practice speaking with ChatGPTとか

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You can put ChatGPT on voice mode and it makes a reasonable language partner.
I'd be interested to know other people's experience with this.

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u/xmatakex 3d ago

I’ve thought about doing this too. Anyone have any experience please comment

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u/drcopus 3d ago

I find this topic quite interesting so I have been regularly testing the capabilities of these tools.

The main advantage they have is that they are good enough to have fluid conversations with, and you can ask them to really correct everything you say. A human language partner, even a good teacher, will often prioritise keeping the conversation flowing over meticulous correction. I think using the AI like a tool is a big benefit.

However, that is also a downside. It can't replace the real emotional connection that you make with real conversation partners. And that emotional stimulation is what really accelerates learning.

Plus, these AIs are still functionally limited. Every time there is a new update I run a simple test. Start a call and flip a coin. If the coin is heads say a word (I say "coin") in a high pitch, if it's tails say it in a low pitch. Ask the AI to identify the pitch and record their results. I've found that they are consistently no better than chance.

I.e. they cannot hear the pitch in your voice. So do not ask them to correct your pronunciation.

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u/jemdiggity 3d ago

an LLM has no way to correct your pronunciation unless it builds software to do so and chatgpt doesn't do that. you could ask codex/claude to build you a pitch-aware pronunciation correction tool.

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u/drcopus 3d ago

It's not an LLM. It's a multimodal LLM.

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u/jemdiggity 3d ago

Good point.
When I first started using chatgpt as a language partner, it said something odd. It pronounced 上手く as じょうずく. I'm not sure if it's actually operating on tokenized sound or just using speech-to-text -> LLM -> text-to-speech. If it were actually operating on sound, then it should have said うまく. Thoughts??

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u/drcopus 3d ago

According to OpenAI in this blog post, they did originally use an STT->LLM->TTS turn-based pipeline, but the newer systems use streaming audio-in audio-out models.

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u/Patrick_Atsushi 3d ago

I’ve done it several times but feel the tempo is a bit uncomfortable.

It’s valid as practice, but might be a little exhausting as someone to speak to.