> What is "good for one's brain" (apart from proper nutrition and absence of concussions) is a strong education and healthy lifelong social interactions
Sure, but I think this is more about the fact that what you don't use, you lose. Learning languages is hard, so even learning old Greek keeps you brain sharp as long as you enjoy it to some extent.
Gym for the brain is good, what you do with it can be better, but gym is still good.
> nor is there ever going to be a 100% freedom-from-error
That is not a problem. Language is messy, you don't need 100% accuracy to learn. The problem is that LLM errors are fundamentally different from human errors, and you won't even know how to recognize them.
Your interlocutors can work around human errors, because they tend to follow the same patterns in same language. But they will freak out with LLM errors.
Spaced repetition = information retrieval.
You need the other part, encoding information. Best "trick" to encode information effectively is to "make it yours" in the best way you can. Develop, explore, follow rabbit holes, ask yourself questions about what you are learning, engage emotionally with the content, write down what you learn in your own words, etc.
For very popular languages: there are tons of human-made content specific for language learning, which is always far better than what any LLM can offer.
For low resource / endangered languages: LLMs still suck.
So no, I don't see the point of this beyond being cheap to produce and cheap to consume.
Exactly. For projects taking multiple years, eventually motivation will run dry. Good habits is what compels you to do the thing when you don't feel like doing the thing.
> In general, I'm sorry to say, I think language learning is a tremendous waste of time and effort for almost everybody
I take from that that you dont like Finnish, you learn it because you have to, and your level is not good enough yet to participate in society exclusively in Finnish.
Nothing wrong with that, but you are generalizing a lot from a very specific context.
A lot of profient L2 speakers will tell you that L2 learning is a very enriching experience indeed.
You have taken me entirely and completely wrong on so many points I don't know where best to start. But let's start with your ad hominems. To hammer home the generality of this argument I will replace all mentions of an L2 language with a randomly selected one from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_official_languages .
* I neither like nor dislike [roll - Tibetan]. I feel about the same way towards [roll - Kalaallisut] as I feel towards all languages, including my native [roll - French].
* I have always had a strong distaste for language learning in general, starting with [roll - Nauruan] when I ~4 years old. But I don't think that distaste is at all uncommon - it's just the obvious ugh reaction anyone would get to something which takes tens of thousands of hours with little to no concrete payoff.
* My level is good enough to "participate in society exclusively in [roll - Khanty]", but I admit it would take at least a few months of immersion I'm simply not interested in doing. However, this kind of statement is like saying "don't worry, tennis becomes fun once you make it to the professional leagues" - it makes the cost-benefit of starting tennis or language learning worse, not better, and much worse if we're talking about a strictly hobbyist approach. Very few other "good" hobbies are like this - 10 minutes of exercise a day, for example, has an astonishing ROI right from the start, if you're starting from zero.
* Your "enriching experience" comment leads us to an interesting question. Consider the group of all people who are C2 CEFR speakers of both, say, [roll - Slavey] and [roll - Sami]. If the experience was so enriching, why are they all not immediately spending another handful of thousands of hours learning a new language? It can't be a monetary cost thing, because language learning is basically free thanks to the Internet. There's no good a priori reason to suspect only the second language is enriching, and the third would be worthless - that would be even weirder. So why don't we see more of them learning e.g. [roll - Zulu]? Because the enrichment isn't worth it. Anything you do consistently for thousands of hours is going to enrich your life, but I would far rather spend those 10,000 hours becoming e.g. a world level Olympic tennis player than a pretty darn good speaker of [roll - Fijian].
1. You don't need to learn hundreds of random languages in order to claim you like languages. Most people feel attracted by some languages and not others, so your generalization point doesn't make any sense.
2. For most people I know language is fun once they start to communicate meaningfully, no need to be on the professional leagues.
3. Some people likes to learn a bit of many languages, others like to learn a ton of just two, others don't have enough time to learn as much as the would like, others like languages but maybe also likes sports as much. Even then, almost 1/2 of world population is bilingual and ~1/6 speaks more than 2 languages.
4. The overwhelming majority of people has the tremendous skill of being able to enjoy something in spite of not having any immediate payoffs. Otherwise no one would be doing difficult things of any kind and we all would be great at filling tax forms.
Rating yourself is an important trait of SRS, it forces you to think how you are doing, what is good enough and what not, what is more or less important, etc.
Sorry, but your landing page is really awful. I’m not allowed to learn about your app because I’m on a tablet? And I have to give you my e-mail address, even though I know nothing about your app so far?
Suggestion: Allow me to browse your site and learn about your application, and I’ll decide if it’s interesting enough for me to open it on my desktop later.
Sure, but I think this is more about the fact that what you don't use, you lose. Learning languages is hard, so even learning old Greek keeps you brain sharp as long as you enjoy it to some extent.
Gym for the brain is good, what you do with it can be better, but gym is still good.
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