ChatGPT and Language Learning
English

ChatGPT and Language Learning

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education
language learning

Today I finally tried out ChatGPT. It's been the current big thing for a while. Everybody talks about it. Even though I'm very skeptical and usually reject all new things, I decided to give it a shot. I asked ChatGPT to find any mistakes in an English assignment I had to do, to improve it, and to give me a list of corrections. I noticed a few things.

For some reason, it reverts all the contractions in the writing. "Isn't" gets changed to "Is not," etc. The reason it gives is "for clarity," which I doubt. Actually, it loves just saying "for clarity" in many other types of corrections. Other reasons also often not very helpful: "for better word choice," "for improved phrasing," "for better flow." Subjectively, it often doesn't really improve anything. Sometimes, it can completely change the meaning of the sentence in the correction provided, so you have to be wary of that.

Those were the negatives. On a positive note, I still found the tool somewhat helpful. I couldn't just use the "enhanced" writing, obviously, but I still got value out of it. Out of fifteen corrections it provided, I used better word choices in five of them. But I had to use my own judgment to decide what's better.

I used it one more time to translate a technical piece of writing — an abstract of a thesis about solving systems of differential equations that I wrote a long time ago. And it did a really good job! Compared to Google Translate, it was like night and day. I struggled to translate it myself because I lack vocabulary in math. For the same reason, though, I could be mistaken about how good of a job it really did — but it looked pretty decent.

While writing this post, I asked it to give me an equivalent of the idiom "как небо и земля," which is used to describe something that's completely different from something else. I couldn't find a proper idiom. With Google, I could only find "like heaven and earth," which looks like a literal translation from Russian, but I don't think that's an actual idiom. With ChatGPT, I got "like night and day," which looked exactly like what I needed.

Overall, I think this tool has its uses. I've heard people say about it, that it can be "confidently incorrect," and that's true. The answers it provides will look absolutely legit, but you should double-check them using other sources. And maybe asking it for things like medical advice is not a very good idea.

Aside from asking for an idiom, I didn't use ChatGPT to enhance this post — only the usual grammar checker.

Headline image by growtika on Unsplash

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