The new ChatGPT is a polyglot, apparently

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Re: The new ChatGPT is a polyglot, apparently

Postby emk » Tue Dec 06, 2022 4:18 pm

emk wrote:Write me a short French dialog about two friendly mountain bike riders. One has an XC bike, and the other has a downhill bike, and they are comparing the advantages of each.

ChatGPT wrote:Bonjour, comment vas-tu? J'ai remarqué que tu avais un vélo de descente. C'est génial! Moi, j'ai un vélo de cross-country. Les avantages du vélo de descente sont la vitesse et la stabilité sur les pentes raides, mais il est un peu lourd pour les longues distances. Mon vélo de cross-country est plus léger et plus rapide sur les terrains plats, mais il n'est pas aussi stable sur les pentes raides. C'est sympa d'avoir les deux options!

Asking again, just for fun:

ChatGPT wrote:Voici un court dialogue en français entre deux amis cyclistes sur leur vélo de montagne. L'un a un vélo de cross-country (XC), et l'autre a un vélo de descente (DH), et ils comparent les avantages de chaque vélo.

Ami 1 : Salut, comment vas-tu ?

Ami 2 : Salut, ça va bien. Et toi, comment va ton vélo de XC ?

Ami 1 : Il va très bien. J'aime la vitesse et l'agilité qu'il me donne sur les sentiers de montagne.

Ami 2 : Oui, c'est vrai que le XC est un excellent choix pour les sentiers rapides et techniques. Mais pour moi, rien ne vaut mon vélo de descente sur les pistes de descente raides et rocheuses.

Ami 1 : J'imagine que le vélo de descente doit être plus lourd et moins facile à manœuvrer que le XC.

Ami 2 : Oui, c'est vrai. Le vélo de descente est plus lourd et plus solide pour gérer les terrains difficiles, mais cela en vaut la peine pour la vitesse et l'adrénaline que cela procure.

Ami 1 : Je comprends. Chacun a ses avantages et ses inconvénients. Mais au final, l'important c'est de s'amuser en roulant sur nos vélos de montagne préférés.

Ami 2 : Tout à fait d'accord. Allons rouler ensemble un de ces jours et montrons nos compétences sur les sentiers. Ça va être génial !

There are some things here that I had to look at twice. I would have guessed that the preferred terms for the different kinds of mountain bikes would be things like:

  • VTT XC (cross country)
  • VTT DH (descente)
...and ChatGPT didn't use "VTT" anywhere, which is odd. But "vélo de descente" is a perfectly valid and common phrasing, I think, so I can't call it wrong.

The phrase "rien ne vaut mon vélo de descente" is also a really interesting phrasing. I'd somehow missed this idiom in a few million words of reading and years of speaking French. But apparently it's real?

And apparently a "descente" can really be "raide", which I didn't know either.

I wouldn't quite trust ChatGPT enough to put its text on an Anki card. Anki cards are weirdly powerful, and I was always very careful to use native sources.

But if I were a B1ish student who wanted a bunch of custom dialogs to help me learn how to talk about what I did today? These dialogs are actually pretty reasonable.

EDIT: Also, I approve this message:

ChatGPT wrote:mais cela en vaut la peine pour la vitesse et l'adrénaline que cela procure.

...or at least I would, if I were still young enough to recover from connective tissue injuries a bit more reliably.
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Re: The new ChatGPT is a polyglot, apparently

Postby Kraut » Wed Dec 07, 2022 12:36 pm

tommus wrote:
Now our challenge with ChatGPT is to figure out the best ways to use it to improve our target language(s) conversational ability. We need to be very innovative. How about some cleaver ideas, suggestions, approaches and concepts? It looks like ChatGPT is up to the challenge. Are we?



I am wondering whether ChatGPT could rewrite the text with the same content but using synonymous words and structures, something like:

"Quando llegamos, fuimos muy decepcionados porque para nuestra sorpresa dentro del hotel la gente no cumplia con el uso requerido de llevar cubrebocas..."

Nada más llegar la impresión fue mala, ya que vimos como huéspedes del hotel bajaban hasta la recepción sin mascarilla sin ser amonestados. En el desayuno, con la comida expuesta sin ningún tipo de protección, se permitió que los huéspedes se pasearan por la zona del buffet sin mascarilla.

----------------------------------
Some intelligent sentence mining:

Complete the sentences that start with:

SIEMPRE QUE VOY A L SUPERMERCADO .....

You can get this also from Google:

Siempre que voy al supermercado me excedo comprando frutas y verduras pensando en todo lo que cocinaré.


Siempre que voy al supermercado, me encuentro con Cristina.


Siempre que voy al supermercado llevo mi bolsa.


Siempre que voy al supermercado compro muchas más cosas de las que pensaba.


Ahora siempre que voy al supermercado paso más tiempo en la zona de bebidas que en la de pinturas y maquillaje.

Siempre que voy al supermercado voy con hambre y eso no es bueno.


Siempre que voy al supermercado o a alguna frutería me quedo fascinada mirando lo bonitas y fotogénicas que son algunas frutas y verduras.
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Re: The new ChatGPT is a polyglot, apparently

Postby tommus » Wed Dec 07, 2022 2:26 pm

I have been exploring more ways that ChatGPT can provide useful Dutch conversational material that is not easy to find from other resources. I think, with a little forethought, you can adjust your questions so that the questions and answers are very appropriate for the language level you are targeting. I find by asking for lists of things with short summaries, you get a useful starting point. Then your next question can be "Can you provide more detail?". That usually results in a quite comprehensive and useful answer.

It seems that usage of the ChatGPT is so high that the site is being overwhelmed. There have been several reports of such problems. It is getting more difficult to log in, and to get responses when you are logged in. I find that clicking on "Reset Thread" as soon as it becomes unresponsive usually works.
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Re: The new ChatGPT is a polyglot, apparently

Postby iguanamon » Wed Dec 07, 2022 2:33 pm

I saw this, today, Is ChatGPT coming for our jobs? from Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist. Paul Krugman.
Paul Krugman wrote:...something new may be happening now.
In the past, the jobs replaced by technology tended to involve manual labor. Machines replaced muscles. On the one hand, industrial robots replaced routine assembly-line work. On the other hand, there has been ever-growing demand for knowledge workers, a term coined by the management consultant Peter Drucker in 1959 for people engaged in non-repetitive problem solving. Many people, myself included, have said that we’re increasingly becoming a knowledge economy.
But what if machines can take over a large chunk of what we have historically thought of as knowledge work?...
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Re: The new ChatGPT is a polyglot, apparently

Postby Sprachprofi » Thu Dec 08, 2022 12:28 pm

I ran some tests as well:
- creation of materials, including in Croatian: 4/5 stars
- general grammar and word usage explanations: 2/5 stars
- suggesting vocabulary to learn: 1/5 stars
- corrections: 3/5 stars

Details and screenshots: https://languagecrush.com/forum/t/3461 (sorry, too lazy to re-upload and redo the formatting here)
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Re: The new ChatGPT is a polyglot, apparently

Postby tommus » Thu Dec 08, 2022 1:01 pm

I have been asking ChatGPT to create dialog in my target language and it has been doing a great job. Here is an interesting one. I asked it to create dialog between air traffic control and a pilot who had just lost an engine and needed instructions for an emergency landing. After each response by ChatGPT, you can carry on the dialog about the situation as it develops and ChatGPT keeps the whole story coherent.
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Re: The new ChatGPT is a polyglot, apparently

Postby Beli Tsar » Thu Dec 08, 2022 4:15 pm

It produces really nice little Latin stories with very little prompting - easy Latin, mostly accurate, and about very varied subjects. It's actually fun to read, unlike most of the easy Latin stories out there... for a language that lacks easy material, it's brilliant. And just a little prompting you can tailor it to your favourite subjects... so far, 'write a short story in Latin' has given me one about someone's interior mystical journey, one about the Christmas story with added drama, and one about a Roman boy catching a really big fish with his friends. It can also give a decent dialogue between two monks, a plausible (if slightly scanty) story about Sherlock Holmes, Bernard of Clairvaux, Augustus, or two Astronauts who landed on Mars.

The errors are occasionally rather odd. e.g. here's an excerpt from a dialogue between two medieval monks about what they prayed for today:
Monachus 1: Ego oro ad Dominum pro pace et unitate in mundo, pro sanitate et felicitate in vita mea, et pro gratia et salutem in morte mea.
Monachus 2: Ego etiam oro pro istis rebus, frater. Et orare pro fratribus nostris et pro tota Ecclesia est etiam maximae importance.

'Importance' is just a random English/French/etc word inserted here...; and the more specific the output you ask for, the more numerous the errors. Just asking for a story usually gives you something decent; a story about Sherlock Holmes brings in errors of gender and agreement.

It's already good enough that I've enjoyed asking it for an occasional story today, for a little reading practice. It would not be hard to use something like this to bulk-produce graded readers - a decent Latinist (or whatever) could skillfully string together a lot of prompts, correct, tweak and adjust, and end up with something quite imaginative and interesting.
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Re: The new ChatGPT is a polyglot, apparently

Postby emk » Sat Dec 10, 2022 12:53 am

I was showing ChatGPT to a francophone friend, and this conversation was just unreal. I asked it for a story of "The Three Firefighters" in the style of "The Three Musketeers."

emk wrote:Écrivez-moi une histoire courte de trois pompiers dans le style des Trois Mousquetaires.

ChatGPT wrote:Les trois pompiers, Pierre, Jacques et Marcel, étaient les meilleurs amis du monde. Ils travaillaient ensemble dans la caserne de pompiers de la ville, où ils étaient toujours prêts à risquer leur vie pour sauver celle des autres.

Un jour, alors qu'ils étaient de service, ils reçurent l'appel d'un immeuble en feu. Sans hésiter, ils sautèrent dans leur camion et se dirigèrent vers l'incendie.

Arrivés sur les lieux, ils constatèrent que le feu était déjà bien avancé et que les flammes menaçaient de s'étendre à d'autres bâtiments. Pierre, le chef d'équipe, ordonna à Jacques et Marcel de prendre les lances à incendie et de commencer à éteindre le feu tandis qu'il allait vérifier si toutes les personnes avaient réussi à sortir de l'immeuble.

Jacques et Marcel s'exécutèrent avec rapidité et efficacité, inondant les flammes de jets d'eau. Pendant ce temps, Pierre faisait le tour de l'immeuble en appelant les personnes qui étaient peut-être encore à l'intérieur.

Soudain, il entendit des cris provenant d'une des fenêtres de l'immeuble. Il se précipita vers l'endroit d'où venaient les cris et vit une femme et son enfant coincés à l'intérieur, sans moyen de sortir.

Pierre ne réfléchit pas à deux fois et se jeta à l'intérieur de l'immeuble en flammes, ignorant les risques pour sa propre vie. Il parvint à atteindre la femme et son enfant, les prenant dans ses bras pour les sortir de l'immeuble.

Jacques et Marcel, qui avaient entendu les cris, coururent vers la fenêtre et aidèrent Pierre à sortir de l'immeuble, tous les trois réussissant à échapper aux flammes de justesse.

La femme et son enfant furent évacués vers l'hôpital, où ils furent soignés pour les blessures légères qu'ils avaient subies. Quant aux trois pompiers, ils furent accueillis en héros par le reste de leur équipe et par la population de la ville, qui les remercia pour leur courage et leur bravoure.

Dès lors, les trois pompiers devinrent les meilleurs amis pour la vie, prêts à tout pour sauver les autres, comme de véritables Trois Mousquetaires.

Honestly, that's not bad all! I tried Googling a few phrases and I couldn't find any matches. The French is written in the passé simple (which is appropriate for the Three Musketeers), though it's not especially old-fashioned. The story is a light, action-oriented annecdote. The structure is solid, and ending wraps things up very nicely, remembering the original prompt.

This sort of prompt really plays to ChatGPT's strengths. It's good at making things up, and it's obviously much better at French than at Latin. But even so, it really seems to understand the idea of "story", and the shape a story should take.

I would have found this super useful between B1 and B2, when I could basically carry on a conversation, but I lacked the vocabulary to talk about most of the specific hobbies and activities I did in a day. Being able to get little annecdotes about my hobbies on demand would have been fantastic.
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Re: The new ChatGPT is a polyglot, apparently

Postby Querneus » Sat Dec 10, 2022 4:14 am

emk wrote:This sort of prompt really plays to ChatGPT's strengths. It's good at making things up, and it's obviously much better at French than at Latin. But even so, it really seems to understand the idea of "story", and the shape a story should take.

I don't know about that even. I've been so surprised so far.

Someone I know asked it "write me a story about a man named Querneus who was very diligent about remembering vowel length in Latin" (these exact words, in English, and nothing more), which is surely a weird prompt that no one has written a story about (the life of a vowel length nerd??), and YET, it actually managed!
ChatGPT wrote:Erat quidam vir, Querneus nomine, qui summa diligentia vocationem suam exsequebatur. Is enim, cum Latine loqueretur, semper longitudinem vocis observabat, ne umquam in errorem incideret.

Querneus autem, cum alios Latine loquentes audiret, nonnumquam eos errare deprehendebat, et monebat eos ut vocis longitudinem attenderent. Quidam autem eum deridebant, et putabant eum nimium sollicitum esse de re minime momenti.

Querneus vero, nullo modo ab eo proposito deterritus, perseverabat in ea re, quam sibi esse necessariam putabat. Et cum annos iam multos in ea re laborasset, eum multi Latine loquentes admirabantur, et ipsi eum imitabantur.

Tandem, cum Querneus iam senex esset, eum multi in Latina lingua peritissimum esse putabant, et ei gratias agebant quod eos in ea re docuisset. Querneus vero, cum hoc audiret, se felicem putabat, quod in ea re tanta diligentia usus esset.

Haec est fabula de Querneo.

It's jaw-dropping. The sense of narrative coherence, and even space management, since it fit it in one response.

We might quip about rendering "vowel length" as "vocis longitudo" and the use of "in" in "in Latina lingua peritissimus", but let's say this is almost entirely correct Latin too.
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Re: The new ChatGPT is a polyglot, apparently

Postby Lysander » Tue Dec 13, 2022 12:37 am

Lysander wrote: can you please explain the use of ser and estar in Spanish

ChatGPT wrote: In Spanish, the verbs "ser" and "estar" both mean "to be," but they are used in different ways. "Ser" is used to describe inherent qualities or characteristics of something, while "estar" is used to describe the current state or condition of something.

For example, "El gato es gris" (The cat is gray) uses "ser" to describe the inherent quality of the cat's color. On the other hand, "La casa está sucia" (The house is dirty) uses "estar" to describe the current state of the house.

Here are some more examples to help you understand the difference between "ser" and "estar":

"Soy de España" (I am from Spain) - "Ser" is used here to describe the speaker's nationality, which is an inherent characteristic.
"Estoy cansado" (I am tired) - "Estar" is used here to describe the speaker's current condition of being tired.
"Este libro es interesante" (This book is interesting) - "Ser" is used here to describe the inherent quality of the book being interesting.
"La comida está deliciosa" (The food is delicious) - "Estar" is used here to describe the current state of the food being delicious.

It can be a little tricky to know when to use "ser" and when to use "estar," but with practice, it will become easier. Just remember that "ser" is used for inherent qualities and characteristics, while "estar" is used for current states and conditions.

Lysander wrote: can you please give more examples?

ChatGPT wrote: Sure! Here are some more examples of "ser" and "estar" in use:

"Ella es alta" (She is tall) - "Ser" is used here to describe the inherent quality of the person's height.
"La pared está verde" (The wall is green) - "Estar" is used here to describe the current color of the wall.
"Somos amigos" (We are friends) - "Ser" is used here to describe the relationship between the speakers and the person they are talking about.
"Estoy feliz" (I am happy) - "Estar" is used here to describe the speaker's current emotional state.
"La situación es complicada" (The situation is complicated) - "Ser" is used here to describe the inherent complexity of the situation.
"El perro está enfermo" (The dog is sick) - "Estar" is used here to describe the current condition of the dog's health.

As you can see, "ser" is used to describe inherent qualities and characteristics, while "estar" is used to describe current states and conditions. It's important to pay attention to the context in which the verbs are used to determine which one is correct.


How neat. I will find it interesting to ask for explanations in the future on grammar points.

I had also messed up on a couple drills early on and wanted to see how it did explaining a pretty silly error caused by a difference in accent mark:

Lysander wrote:what is the difference between está and esta in spanish?

ChatGPT wrote:In Spanish, "está" is the third person singular form of the verb "estar," which means "to be." It is used to describe the current state or condition of something. For example, "La comida está deliciosa" (The food is delicious) uses "está" to describe the current state of the food being delicious.

On the other hand, "esta" is a pronoun that means "this" or "these." It is used to refer to something or someone that is nearby or close in time. For example, "Esta es mi casa" (This is my house) uses "esta" to refer to the speaker's house.

So, the main difference between "está" and "esta" is that "está" is a verb, while "esta" is a pronoun. "Está" is used to describe the current state or condition of something, while "esta" is used to refer to something or someone nearby. It's important to pay attention to the context in which these words are used to determine which one is correct.

That is a pretty nice explanation. I like this as a tool to ask "stupid" or basic questions. There is no judgment, just knowledge.

edit: i got it to make fill-in-the-blank exercises for the Spanish subjunctive too:

ChatGPT wrote:Sure! Here is a fill-in-the-blank exercise using the subjunctive mood in Spanish. Try to fill in the blanks with the correct form of the subjunctive before checking the answers below:

Es importante que tú ________ aquí a las 7:00. (It is important that you be here at 7:00.)
No es necesario que él ________ la tarea. (It is not necessary for him to do the homework.)
Me alegro de que ellos ________ felices. (I am happy that they are happy.)
No es probable que ella ________ a la fiesta. (It is not likely that she will go to the party.)
Es posible que nosotros ________ a la playa el fin de semana. (It is possible that we will go to the beach this weekend.)

Here are the answers to the fill-in-the-blank exercise above:

Es importante que tú estés aquí a las 7:00. (It is important that you be here at 7:00.)
No es necesario que él haga la tarea. (It is not necessary for him to do the homework.)
Me alegro de que ellos sean felices. (I am happy that they are happy.)
No es probable que ella vaya a la fiesta. (It is not likely that she will go to the party.)
Es posible que nosotros vayamos a la playa el fin de semana. (It is possible that we will go to the beach this weekend.)

The subjunctive mood is used to express actions or states that are uncertain or dependent on something else. It is often used after certain conjunctions and expressions, such as "es importante que" (it is important that) and "es posible que" (it is possible that). With practice, using the subjunctive mood correctly will become easier.
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