How AI Is Reshaping Foreign-Language Education

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How AI Is Reshaping Foreign-Language Education

When I was a kid, I felt hypnotized by the shelves in my best friend’s apartment. They contained, it seemed, endless volumes of Japanese-language books—including, most crucially to a child’s eye, comics such as Dragon Ball and Urusei Yatsura. I was gazing at an impossibly distant world; I wanted so badly to comprehend the stories on those pages, but translations wouldn’t be published in the United States until years later.

Those early experiences motivated my study of Japanese in high school and college. But if I were a teenager today, I might be tempted to skip over the courses altogether. Translation programs powered by AI have become extraordinarily effective. In an article published by The Atlantic this week, the journalist Louise Matsakis explores what these advanced tools may augur for foreign-language education, which is already on the decline in America and elsewhere. The story gestures toward broader issues with AI: It is certainly a technology of convenience, but convenience can sometimes mean sacrifice. “Learning a different way to speak, read, and write helps people discover new ways to see the world—experts I spoke with likened it to discovering a new way to think,” Matsakis writes. “No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience. Yet tech companies are weaving automatic translation into more and more products.

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