TechTakes

can we pin this one?

can anyone recommend a language learning app or system that isn’t dependent on LLM garbage? after bouncing off of Duolingo I almost landed on Readlang, but:

• all of its features seem to be LLM-dependent
• because of that, its word and phrase explanations have a bit of oddity to them that I feel will get worse when I get past the beginner material
• it’s a lot slower than it should be because it’s calling into ChatGPT for everything
• even though this is supposedly their strength, I’ve had really bad instances where a GPT-based translation app translates Spanish (which should be fairly easy) into absolutely nonsensical English, and I’m kind of terrified I’ll make a fool of myself learning Spanish from a system where that’s a statistically likely probability
• maybe I don’t want to pay some asshole to not write me some study materials????
• plagiarism and the rainforests
• it feels like Readlang really doesn’t need an LLM or a $6/month subscription that’ll almost certainly go up? like, it’s essentially an e-reader with a manual translation feature (that could be just a Spanish word/phrase dictionary) that also generates flash cards whenever you activate the translation. is there really not an e-reader or browser plugin that just does this shit without LLMs?

with that rant out of the way, I’m open to suggestions that aren’t Duolingo’s model or another round of passing grades and zero vocabulary retention at the community college