AI Brings The True Beginning Of Foreign Language Education
Not the end of it.
I hate how negative the world’s become.
Awful things are happening around the world and evolutions worth worrying about. True. Do we have to put the emphasis on each one and ignore the positives though? Can’t we find the light even in darkness?
As a muggle passionate about AI, I keep seeing new advancements week after week.1 Unfortunately, most of them get buried under a sea of people claiming the end of the world is approaching.
There’s no more common topic than all the “AI will ruin education” rhetoric.
So when I saw an article titled “The End of Foreign-Language Education,” I knew I was in for some blood-boiling reading.
This is my way of correcting that piece and saying AI will help language learning, not kill it.
Correlation doesn’t mean causation
The article shares the following depressing statistic from the Modern Language Association (MLA): “Total enrollment in language courses other than English at American colleges decreased 29.3% from 2009 to 2021.”
The author then shares a few more stats from other countries about this decrease to showcase how international this situation is.
The problem? ChatGPT, the first widely-used AI tool, only came out in late 2022. The decrease started long before AI became accessible to the masses.
The author finishes this part by recognizing other factors may have impacted this drop but also stating:
It’s clear that people are turning away from language learning just as automatic translation becomes ubiquitous across the internet.
That’s a correlation. True. But I can’t agree automatic translation is the cause.
People relying on automatic translation usually do it on holiday abroad. They use OCR to scan and understand their menu or give directions to the driver. I did it a lot while in Vietnam.
Nobody ever went to university to learn a language just for a trip.
The biggest enemy here isn’t AI. It’s how we try to convince people to learn languages.
Let’s turn back to the paper with the depressing statistic mentioned above. Well, if you keep reading it a bit, you can see this decrease isn’t happening for all languages. ASL enrollments increased by 0.8%, Biblical Hebrew by 9.1%, and Korean by a whopping 38.3%.
There was also an increase of enrollments at the introductory level for quite a few languages (Japanese, Korean, Ancient Greek, and many more less commonly taught languages).
It’s not all bleak.
And, again, it’s not AI’s fault. It’s the Education system’s fault
Maybe it’s time to make learning attractive?
I can still remember parents and teachers saying Wikipedia would ruin Education and us kids wouldn’t learn anything anymore because everything was available online.
Well, I began learning because the internet was accessible. I loved learning online because I could make errors without feeling stupid in front of a class.
It’s too easy to blame AI for this decrease in foreign language learning enrollments. The problem is simply that we’ve all been scarred by (at least) one crappy language teacher back in middle or high school.
Hell, some teachers even succeed in making learning as a whole boring. That’s why more and more people turn to the internet.
The goal of a biology class shouldn’t be to teach biology per se. It should be to make the students curious enough to want to dive into it outside of class too. The goal of a language class shouldn’t be to teach grammar patterns. It should be to show the students how incredible knowing that language could be.
The focus is all wrong.
Sure, we should set some ground rules. But why do classes have to be the “standard”? After all, students of all levels comprise every class. There will always be people thinking a class is too slow and others thinking it’s too fast.
In my recently-started class about Translation and Interpretation from Korean to French, some other students told me the problem with the King Sejong Institute’s classes was that they were too fast. Yet, I find it wouldn’t hurt if we went faster. Our levels are just different. And it’s okay.
Instead of trying to teach all the content of a textbook in the classroom, we should be shown how to use it on our own and, on the contrary, use AI to complement our studies at home. Then we can ask more questions in class and create a real exchange with the teachers. Not a one-direction system that serves nobody.
This applies to every subject.
I don’t remember anything from my biology classes because I hated the teachers I got. I do remember what a friend who was later doing a PhD in DNA reproduction told me during a few parties about biology. I even went to look a few things up after because she had made me curious.
Curiosity matters.
In her piece, the author even cites Jen William, head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University, that schools should “stress more than ever the intercultural components of language learning that tremendously benefit the students taking these classes.”
That’s it.
People need to do it because they want to.
A crappy reason means a crappy resolve
The article opens with the author sharing her shock at hearing an AI-cloned version of herself speaking Mandarin flawlessly despite her “studying the language on and off for only a few years.” Sure, the technology has gotten surprisingly good. I remember my surprise at hearing my voice with ElevenLabs.
It’s her reaction that’s wrong:
[HeyGen]’s language technology is good enough to make me question whether learning Mandarin is a wasted effort.
A wasted effort? This made me question why she even began learning Chinese in the first place so I looked her up a bit. Apart from this article, no trace of her study of Chinese appears online.2 Only that she’s “a journalist covering technology & China.” So, yes, she might have learned some Mandarin but it sure feels like she’s not learning it for a deeply ingrained want or need. She could be but that line makes me doubt it.
In the end, learning anything—and languages in particular—takes time. A whole lot of it. Why should we be surprised about how good AI is? It’s in the name: Artificial Intelligence.
It’s ok to have the AI be better than us at speaking a language.
What matters is the experience.
Nobody reaches a high level of fluency in a language just to understand something. It may start like this, but what makes them continue is the connection they build with the country, its culture, and its people.
It’s the experiences they live connected to that language.
I’ve been learning Japanese and Korean for about 15 years and still get surprised by both languages. I love seeing them evolve and discovering more of the cultures associated with them.
It’s okay to have fewer people learn languages
This may feel contradictory with my stance on language learning as a whole. After all, I still stand by what I said a few years ago in an article called “I dream of a world full of polyglots.” I truly do.
I’m also deeply aware this will never happen. And forcing everybody to learn languages isn’t so useful (nor does it work).
We shouldn’t try to make everybody learn languages. We should try to motivate as many people as possible to try it. Let them decide if they do want to keep going.
I’d rather have 5 people learning languages for years than 20 feeling pressured into doing it and not even trying to remember anything.
I love language learning. I would love for everybody to realize how incredible and life-changing it can be. But it’s delusional to think it’s possible.
Instead of forcing people, let’s empower them to make their own choices.
And for those who do decide to learn languages, they’ve come at the right time.
AI is making language learning a lot more active and efficient.
As usual, thanks for reading!
Mathias
What’s your position on this? Do you think AI will kill language learning or help it?
PS: A side note I had written got deleted by accident and I can’t seem to remember how I wanted it to fit so here it is: It’s not because there are fewer class enrolments that language learning is decreasing. Online communities have grown and so many tools to learn without classes now exist that many people consider classes as less important or not needed at all.
Not that you need to leave a trace online to be doing but someone saying language learning is dead should probably know better.
I agree with this. I also feel one learns a language to connect to the world deeper. There are phrases in different languages and stories which when read in native language make a difference. The communication part of language is a professional side of languages.