Time to stop studying languages?

General discussion about learning languages
YtownPolyglot
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Re: Time to stop studying languages?

Postby YtownPolyglot » Mon Feb 27, 2017 4:42 pm

It will never be time to stop studying languages. If nothing else, they're going to need somebody to create and service all of those thingamajigs.
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Re: Time to stop studying languages?

Postby dampingwire » Mon Feb 27, 2017 11:42 pm

YtownPolyglot wrote:It will never be time to stop studying languages. If nothing else, they're going to need somebody to create and service all of those thingamajigs.


I agree that it will be a long time before those thingamajigs turn up, but I bet the people servicing them (assuming that they don't become part of the currently-popular throwaway-it-away culture) will not need a whole heap of language study. I suspect that even the creators (of the language content part) will be native speakers.

Still, probably not in our lifetimes, eh :-)
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Re: Time to stop studying languages?

Postby Serpent » Tue Feb 28, 2017 12:37 am

People who understand both languages will still be needed for testing :)
Anyway the idea is nothing new, it's the implementation that is so tricky :P
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Re: Time to stop studying languages?

Postby BalancingAct » Tue Feb 28, 2017 1:00 am

Question posed by someone in clown college.
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Re: Time to stop studying languages?

Postby Jean-Luc » Tue Feb 28, 2017 3:08 pm

No, definitely not.

Such devices will improve and do a day, for sure, the job. The need for an "international language" will decrease (like Esperanto or English). But learning a language is more about interacting with people and is required too to discover a culture. Using the local language is not only speaking but "living" it. Feelings you could hardly get with a translator if you don't study the language.
We will use more and more automatic translators to read Chinese articles or trade with a German and language learning will become much more a cultural thing. Automatic Translators could save, too, a lot of minor languages by reducing the need of a third language.
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Re: Time to stop studying languages?

Postby rdearman » Tue Feb 28, 2017 6:41 pm

BalancingAct wrote:Question posed by someone in clown college.

hehehe... I got it. ;)
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Re: Time to stop studying languages?

Postby William Camden » Tue Feb 28, 2017 7:15 pm

Perhaps one day we will be able to download a language like Neo downloads the ability to fly a helicopter in The Matrix. I dabbled a bit with machine translation in the 1990s, and Google Translate is pretty miraculous now compared to that. Onwards and upwards...
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Re: Time to stop studying languages?

Postby tommus » Tue Feb 28, 2017 10:47 pm

rdearman wrote:hehehe... I got it. ;)

I couldn't get it, but my wife did.
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Re: Time to stop studying languages?

Postby reineke » Tue May 15, 2018 12:48 am

The Shallowness of Google Translate

The program uses state-of-the-art AI techniques, but simple tests show that it's a long way from real understanding.

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/551570/
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Re: Time to stop studying languages?

Postby zjones » Tue May 15, 2018 1:26 am

Yeah, no. I agree with emk here. Google Translate still isn't dependable, how could this be much better? My family used GT to communicate with a Ukrainian orphan that they hosted over the holidays, and the translations were all over the place.
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