It’s nearing black friday and I’m seeing lots of sales for different apps. Wanikani has been great for kanji reading for me, but I’d like to start building up my speaking and listening. Pimsleur audio’s have been quite helpful, but I’m also wondering about AI chat solutions. ChatGPT isn’t bad, but unstructured. I see there are apps like Jumpspeak and Sakuraspeak amongst others. Is there something that’s truly effective? Or custom GPT’s that would be useful for me?
I’ll eventually get to human interactions & exchanges, but I’m not ready for that yet.
I’m typically against AI use for language learning because there are problems with hallucination and it agreeing with the user too much. If you make a mistake when speaking with it, it will be unlikely to correct you and if it makes a mistake when teaching you, you won’t know as a beginner what to look for. We learn languages to talk to people rather than machines.
It’s worth looking at human teachers for speaking I think. I haven’t made that step with Japanese yet but I think it was helpful earlier this year for Spanish. The only way to really know whether you’re ready is to try. Italki or preply may have a sale, check on that.
Pimsleur isn’t bad, it just might be expensive. It’s good for getting pronunciation right but it’s not a one stop shop kind of resource.
Italki was transformative. I have listened to a lot of Japanese language content ,only barely understanding what was going on, but I never have really needed to speak Japanese even in Japan as a tourist. I was really surprised at how much progress I made fairly quickly. There is something about communicating with an actual human that AI can’t replicate at least so far.
Lingodeer app, within lessons, has the option to listen to a sentence, record yourself saying it, and then play back and compare (shadowing). I found it really helpful for getting my pronunciation and intonation down. I was lucky enough to get lifetime membership years ago for USD100, but it looks like it’s on sale at the moment for $200. They have other languages too, which I can’t speak for, but the Japanese course is good.
It’s not a normed thing - you’ll be able to find teachers there doing either. I was looking for the latter and found it (a “random conversation” on my level + corrections + typed out new vocab, if course), and I also heard of people taking lessons there.
Totally suggest italki over AI any day. I understand not feeling ready, but I don’t think you ever really feel ready with things like that. In fact I have 1 lesson a week with my Japanese teacher and every time I don’t feel ready for it.
I actually do pimsleur, too. If I compare value based on price, italki has def helped me more. I really like pimsleur tho.
For reference I was around Genki L9 when I booked my first lesson. Not only has it helped me with talking, but getting over the fear to make mistakes (which I make A LOT)
I’m def not good at speaking yet, but at this point we only use around 5-10 English words in a 45min lesson.
I’ve done 15 lessons so far. And usually I prep the grammar for the lesson and we then go through grammar exercises together. Next lesson we will start with Genki L16 grammar.
My teacher also gives me extra information the textbook doesn’t provide which is super useful.
Most importantly we always laugh a lot and it’s a really fun experience!
Oh and one more useful thing that comes to mind is that a teacher can tell you it’s ok to skip something.
I’ve had a handful of words and a grammar rule that just did NOT want to go into my head.
My teacher told me that these words and that specific grammar rule are fine to put aside for now and move on.
Without a teacher I no doubt would not have moved on, which can really slow you down in the long run.
First, I took 3 or 4 lessons a week for almost 3 months. Also, I tried 5 or 6 teachers before settling on 2 at first and then tried a few other teachers as I went along. At least half the classes were 30 minute “free” conversation classes. I needed teachers who would not use English, but were patient and kind and would actively try to help me learn. I had a lot of Japanese buried deep in my brain from years of listening to musicals and interviews with no subtitles that I sometimes tried to sort of translate by listening to them over and over. I also was on and off listening to 日本語の森 or various vlogs. But, I was doing no formal study. The Italki classes knitted together everything I had ever learned and helped me learn some knew grammar and vocabulary so that I could actually speak in sentences. I went to an event in my town recently which was held entirely in Japanese and I was able to understand about 30/40% of a talk on manufacturing full of very hard, formal vocabulary and also talk to the people at my table who were all native speakers. I understood most of the questions posed by audience members to the speakers.
i also second using your money for iTalki. i think the hardest part will be finding a teacher you’re compatible with. right now, I’m only seeing one teacher and we’re going through Genki II practice together.
i think it depends on whether they have a ton of experience or are just starting out. I’ve seen like $60 per hour, but I’ve also seen $10 per hour. personally, i go for the cheaper ones as i like to be consistent on seeing them. but maybe the average i’ve seen would be between $15-25 if they are a community tutor and not a professional one.