> I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african language, but one with tens of millions of speakers worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output.
This isn't a problem with the technology; it's easy to observe that it doesn't happen with better-known languages. Your problem is that you don't have a model for your target language.
> Is this better or worse than not helping at all? I'd argue worse.
My first instincts go that way too. But note that language classes consider it desirable for the students to try to speak with each other in the target language. (And not just where they can be supervised - the more they do it, in any context, the better.)
If the only input you ever get has the grammar incorrect, your grammar will also be incorrect. But you can handle a lot of your input being incorrect without major problems.
> This isn't a problem with the technology; it's easy to observe that it doesn't happen with better-known languages. Your problem is that you don't have a model for your target language.
technically, you're correct. But I don't expect to see much given how resources for ai licenses are calculated.
> I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african language, but one with tens of millions of speakers worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output.
This isn't a problem with the technology; it's easy to observe that it doesn't happen with better-known languages. Your problem is that you don't have a model for your target language.
> Is this better or worse than not helping at all? I'd argue worse.
My first instincts go that way too. But note that language classes consider it desirable for the students to try to speak with each other in the target language. (And not just where they can be supervised - the more they do it, in any context, the better.)
If the only input you ever get has the grammar incorrect, your grammar will also be incorrect. But you can handle a lot of your input being incorrect without major problems.