Laura Romig, Brown University Language Ambassador, Class of 2025
ChatGPT, the AI chatbot created by developers at OpenAI using machine learning language models, can write you a passable essay or cover letter, debug your code, generate short stories and poetry, and offer plausible sounding explanations for almost any question you could think to ask. Oh, and it can also give you relationship advice. But can it teach you a language?
Of course, online language learning tools already abound, from carefully crafted online courses or programs created by trained instructors, to apps like Duolingo, to social media channels that post language learning content. Translation tools, dictionaries, and forums about specific languages are also commonplace and often utilized by students learning a language.
But perhaps what makes ChatGPT so appealing to some language learners—and to students in general—is that it seems to offer all of those individual tools at once, neatly packaged in a smooth user interface, free of charge and of ads. There is no need to sift through Google results or wait until business hours to email your instructor; the chatbot seems to provide useful information and quick answers to any question you could imagine.
I watched some language teachers try to use ChatGPT, as well as playing around with it myself to see if it could help me learn Mandarin Chinese. The tool has a plethora of potential uses, but some of the most powerful include: providing a succinct clarification of grammar or vocabulary, correcting sentences, giving examples of usage, or generating stories for practice.
But no matter whether you use ChatGPT for fun experimentation or as a language learning tool, it has one constant pitfall: there is no check for accuracy, and the program's primary goal is to sound plausibly human - not to provide you with correct information. While this may be less of a problem if, for example, you ask ChatGPT to write you a portion of code (which can then be checked by running it), it can become an issue with language issues, where correct usage is not so easily checked—until you get into a conversation with a native speaker and potentially misuse a word. ChatGPT gives pretty good answers, most of the time. But it's prone to leave out details, and it can (and does) make mistakes.
For example, I asked ChatGPT "how do I use 于是 in Chinese?". In English, the program responded with a definition and translation into English, an explanation of usage, and an example. The bot didn't mention, however, that 于是 is often used in past storytelling, or make the connection between 于是 and the similar but more broad 所以, both of which I learned about in my Intermediate Chinese course (and can be read about with a Google search).
One of the more interesting use cases for ChatGPT is, in my opinion, the ability to generate small stories meant to help you practice reading in a language at a specific level; when used as a supplement to materials created by real instructors (or stories and poems written by real people), I think these practices could be a useful supplementary material—if we keep in mind they could potentially contain errors.
It's also important to keep in mind that the dataset ChatGPT was trained on comes from the Internet (up to 2021), so if the language you want to learn has fewer examples of text or instruction available on the Internet, the chatbot's responses may be less accurate.
And of course, ChatGPT can't hold a conversation with you. While it may be tentatively useful for quick clarifications, it doesn't offer the collaborative and enriching experience of learning a language alongside other students, or among native speakers. The best language learning experience will still be with a real speaker, especially someone who has been trained to teach that language. ChatGPT may be a helpful tool, but it's still a tool, not enough to teach you a language by itself. (And of course, don't use it if your language instructor specifically asks you not to.) We can mindfully appreciate technological tools like ChatGPT, but still think critically about when and how to use them.
For more, you can try the tool out yourself here (maybe try asking it some language learning questions?) and take a look at this article about whether ChatGPT is good at translation.