Generative AI is fast, affordable and advancing rapidly. Can AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Gemini perform tasks of a language tutor and make costly Chinese lessons dispensable?
In 2023, I wrote a blog article titled ‘Learning Chinese with ChatGPT – a game changer?‘. I summarized how I had been using ChatGPT to improve my Chinese skills. My conclusion: ChatGPT can do some really cool stuff, but I can’t really see how this changes everything and makes teachers, experts in the field and all kind of learning resources and tools obsolete. Kris from explore-chinese.com also wrote a skeptical piece about AI-powered Chinese learning, contrasting “dead” AI-tools to the special skills of language teachers.
With the more recent development of AI language tutors like Talkpal and yourteacher.ai the question – if AI truly is a game changer – is back on the table. Yet with a slightly new twist, since these AI-tools support audio – both in- and output – and speed & availability of AI-tools have improved significantly.
Defining (AI) ‘language tutor’
To make this article work we have to start with defining what a language tutor does. A language tutor is someone who provides personalized instruction and guidance to help students learn and improve their skills in a particular language, focusing on areas such as speaking, listening, reading, writing, and grammar (or whatever the learner thinks most important). If we break it down somewhat more, it’s someone – ideally with a certain level of expertise and knowledge – to practice your language skills with.
An AI language tutor is a computer program that uses artificial intelligence to basically do the same thing. That is to provide personalized language learning support, offering interactive exercises, conversation practice, feedback, and explanations to help learners improve their language skills.
ChatGPT as a language tutor – what can it do?
As it is said, ChatGPT is your best friend, but what can it do as AI language tutor? And is it any good? Let’s first take a look at the tutoring activities it can perform:
1. Chinese chitchatting with ChatGPT
ChatGPT allows you to engage in daily conversations to practice writing, speaking and listening. No matter how silly your questions, it always replies. When you tell it to act like your language tutor for Chinese and give more context, it’ll support you even better (although it’s far from perfect).
Example:
- User: You’re Michaela, my Chinese language teacher. You’re helping me advance my Chinese conversation skills by chatting casually with me. Let’s start.
- ChatGPT: 好啊！我们开始吧。你最近怎么样？有没有什么有趣的事情发生？
A better tactic is to take a topic you’re familiar with, interested in or currently studying and use that as a conversation starter. That’s a good way to practice what you’ve learnt and make progress. I’ll go into speaking practice with ChatGPT later in this article.
2. AI-powered vocabulary building
ChatGPT can help you learning new vocabulary or deepening your understanding how to use certain expressions almost like a real teacher, just more mechanic and computer-like.
Example:
- User: 你能给我一些关于家庭的词汇吗？
- ChatGPT: 当然！这是一些家庭的词汇：爸爸、妈妈、哥哥、姐姐、弟弟、妹妹、祖父、祖母。
Unlike this example, I’d always go for taking one vocabulary item at the time and have ChatGPT generate example sentences. So far I found ChatGPT doing a solid job on explaining what a certain word means and how it can be used.
3. Good old grammar exercises
Maybe not the most exciting option, but – if needed – ChatGPT is more than happy to offer detailed explanations of Chinese grammar rules and create exercises for practice. You can also request sentence corrections and explanations of mistakes.
Example:
- User: 你能解释一下“了”的用法吗？
- ChatGPT: 当然可以。“了”有很多用法，主要用于表示动作的完成。例如：“我吃了饭”表示你已经吃过饭了。
I often prefer explanations in English for a tricky case like “了” for instance. If you want to check your comprehension, the AI-chatbot will provide you instant feedback and even politely correct you if needed.
4. Story telling with ChatGPT
This is one ChatGPT feature I particularly enjoy: ChatGPT can provide short texts or articles in Chinese and even ask comprehension questions about the text. You can have the AI-tool write a short story about aliens landing in your hometown for example. ChatGPT can’t adjust its input according to different HSK levels (as far as I could tell), but you can use ‘beginner’, ‘intermediate’, ‘advanced’ instead, although it tends to set difficulty standards rather high.
Example:
- User: 你能提供一段关于北京的中文短文吗？然后问我一些问题。
- ChatGPT: 当然可以！“北京是中国的首都，有许多著名的历史古迹，如长城和故宫。”
- 问题：北京是哪个国家的首都？北京有哪些著名的历史古迹？
5. Writing & correction
Another service ChatGPT provides is giving free feedback and corrections on your Chinese writings. This is a extremely convenient way to get better at using complex sentence structures and more elaborate vocabulary, although the AI-tool – in my opinion – can’t beat a skilled teacher with whom you can actually discuss certain points face to face.
Example:
- User: 我写了一段中文，你能帮我检查一下吗？“昨天我去了公园，看到很多人跑步。”
- ChatGPT: 你的中文写得很好！你可以加上更多的细节，比如“昨天我去了公园，看到很多人跑步，还有孩子们在玩耍.”
6. Studying and understanding Chinese characters
If you have a hard time understanding Chinese characters and their components, ChatGPT is able to help out. I wouldn’t advise to trust ChatGPT’s explanations blindly though and always check other sources like online Chinese dictionaries as well, but in most cases the AI-chatbot will give you helpful information about Chinese characters and how they work.
Example:
- User: 你能解释一下“好”这个字的组成部分吗？
- ChatGPT: 当然！“好”由两个部分组成：左边是“女”，表示女性，右边是“子”，表示孩子。合在一起表示好。
7. Listening practice with AI-voices
ChatGPT can produce audio now, so you can ask it for fun dialogues (or anything) to practice your listening skills. The voice(s) sound natural, yet they all have a pretty thick American accent (I noticed that not only for Chinese) which isn’t optimal. But the main point is that any chat conversation can be put into audio for listening practice.
Example:
- User: 你能写一个关于点餐的中文对话吗？
- ChatGPT: 可以！这里是一个简单的对话：
- A: 你好，请给我菜单。
- B: 你好，这是菜单。您想点什么？
- A: 我想要一份炒饭和一杯茶。
8. Understanding China & the Chinese language(s)
Finally, you can shoot all your questions about Chinese culture, history, idiomatic expressions or whatever you can think of at ChatGPT to gain a deeper understanding of the Chinese language in context, although – I’m repeating myself – you shouldn’t trust everything it tells you.
Example:
- User: 你能告诉我一些中国的成语和它们的意思吗？
- ChatGPT: 当然！这是几个常见的成语：
- “画蛇添足” – 意思是做多余的事，反而不恰当。
- “塞翁失马，焉知非福” – 意思是坏事可能会变成好事。
Benefits
Now we’ve covered the most obvious tutoring tasks ChatGPT can perform, let’s tackle the benefits this brings. These advantages come to my mind first. ChatGPT:
- Is always available to practice. For language practice I personally don’t think ChatGPT’s different versions (currently 3.5 & 4.0) matter that much
- Can elaborate on almost any kind of topic or area of human knowledge
- Can explain almost anything language-related and give practical examples
- Can play multiple roles, correct and support you
- Audio comes in written form and visa versa, perfect for recap
- Currently ChatGPT 3.5 is freely available
Limits
Now I’ve mentioned that high availability, functionality and low costs are among ChatGPT’s benefits, it’s time to sum up some negative points as well. Let’s have a look at the limits of ChatGPT as a online Chinese language tutor:
- ChatGPT can mimic human conversation, but not (completely) replicate it, because AI is not human. It doesn’t brush its teeth or go to the supermarket to buy groceries. My point: you can’t connect on a human level with it.
- Speech-to-text function doesn’t always process correctly what you intended to say. This is especially true for Chinese. If you’re tones are off, ChatGPT might get it entirely wrong where as your teacher would most likely guess and understand what you’re trying to articulate.
- I found it hard to have a free flowing conversation as ChatGPT, although it does respond to what you’re saying, tends to continually ask the same kind of questions (what do you want to know about…, what kind of X particularly interests you? etc.)
- Cannot correct pronunciation mistakes or assess your Chinese skills as a teacher would
- Not practical to use for beginners, although multilingual in- and output is possible. ChatGPT seems to have difficulties adapting to different language levels, especially the lower ones. Plus, it does not know what you know and you can’t command it to respect certain HSK-levels.
- Last but not least: trust and data security. The tutor-student-relation is built on trust. I’m not sure whether I’d trust ChatGPT with my personal information, even mundane stuff.
Hands-free audio function on mobile vs writing
As I pointed out before, AI language tutoring with ChatGPT currently comes in two ‘tastes’. You can chat by writing text messages, however, by using ChatGPT’s mobile app you’re able to have hands-free audio chats as well. As always with ChatGPT results tend to get better with increased ‘prompt quality’. In both cases, you should tell ChatGPT exactly what role to play and how to do it.
Texting obviously has the advantage of being able to articulate more carefully and create more meaningful conversations. ChatGPT’s output tends to be quicker in written form as well.
Audio input comes with the risk of miscommunications. Get the tones wrong and ChatGPT probably won’t understand you or even think you’re speaking English or something else. This means – as I already mentioned – this function is not very attractive for beginners.
ChatGPT vs AI language tutoring platforms
Not surprisingly, smart people have used the possibilities of ChatGPT to build AI-powered platforms where you can enhance your Chinese language skills together with AI teachers. These tools are specially build and set up for language learning and can be personalized to fit your learning profile.
Instead of chatting with the faceless large language model ChatGPT, you’re tutor for Chinese is called Xiaoling Wang for example. She is the AI teacher from the platform called yourteacher.ai. This app also created a friendly interface to practice various language skills and engage in different kind of exercises. In other words, these AI language learning platforms like Talkpal, yourteacher.ai and LangBuddy.ai are more user-friendly than ChatGPT, even though they’re based on the same technology.
It’s worth mentioning that from the Trustpilot reviews of these three AI startups, you get a very mixed picture. Some people are absolutely lyrical about the new AI technology for language learning, others complain that the software is bugging, support is lacking, translations are incorrect and the overall product quality is not ready for market. That being said, I do think these platforms potentially are the next step from fooling around with ChatGPT to an actual AI-powered language learning experience that is more efficient and rewarding.
Conclusion
The future naturally will show us what is possible and which AI-tools truly provide added value for language learners. I think we can expect a more personalized, structured and user-friendly learner journey in the years to come. That entails customized dashboards, comprehensible input on your target level and different practicing modes with your preferred AI avatar.
People who follow this blog know that I’m open, yet also critical when it comes to new tools and technologies. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve probably overloaded OpenAI’s servers with all my experimenting with the AI chatbot -, but I don’t see how ChatGPT or any AI language tutor can replace a skilled and experienced teacher, let alone real human interaction, which is essential to language learning. I really do think that language learning is all about communication and communication is all about meaningful interaction. This last bit can be imitated, but not completely reproduced by AI. That’s why I think AI language tutors can have a supportive role, but not replace humans.
What do you think? Are you using AI language tutors or other AI-tools for language learning? Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.
