Hey guys, just wanted to show my appreciation for ChatGPT, a tool usually frowned upon by most learning communities for its tendency to hallucinate. I don't disagree entirely, but I also think it's much better than people give it credit for. I've been slowly studying Japanese for a few months, mainly with Anki and Tae Kim. Just recently, I got the basic grammar points down along with a few thousand words and wanted to solidify my learnings through immersion. I decided to try playing the Japanese version of an old Gameboy game, "Medabots".
Since I only knew a few words (and mostly kanji at that), I quickly hit a roadblock not even 1 minute into the game:
それならおくのはかせのへやをのぞいてごらん。
I had no idea what おく meant, so I typed it out in ichi.moe, which promptly showed me this:
Unfortunately, this only left me more confused since the website decided to interpret おく as a transitive verb.
What were my other options? I didn't want to ask something as simple as this in the daily thread (I might end up posting the entire game at this rate). I decided to try my luck with ChatGPT and see what it would say. ChatGPT then proceeded to show me this:
Lo and behold! Not only did ChatGPT correctly interpret おく as 奥; it also provided a neat little explanation for each word and particle. Of course, I made sure to take some precautions. I had the English version of the game in the background and also double-checked each explanation with a grammar and vocab resource. I was already thoroughly impressed by this, but that wasn't the end of it.
I soldiered on and tried to read a few more dialogues, but the weird font style and low resolution wasn't doing me any favors. I asked ChatGPT if I could send it some pictures, to which they replied no problem. Dialogue screenshot was sent, and a few seconds later:
Perfect character recognition. I am completely blown away. At this point I'm just about ready to bow down to our future AI overlords. Unfortunately I got stopped by the daily limit, so I decided to call it quits for now and make this post instead.
Would I recommend ChatGPT to a complete beginner? Probably not. We can never be sure if what ChatGPT is saying is right or wrong. But I think if you know enough grammar and vocabulary to at least be able to tell when something feels off (and have resources on hand to check), ChatGPT becomes a wonderful tool.
What do you guys think? Am I making a huge mistake by relying on AI? What other resources would you recommend for this particular situation?
by boredfrogger