MandoMaster 3: This Time with More AI

My Chinese Progress

By now I actually know a couple of Chinese words, and the pure SRS experience has left me wanting more. Especially I've noticed that while I may know certain words, I don't really know how to utilize them. This was something that I originally intended to address via the lessons.

The Problem with the Lessons

These took quite a while to write/rewrite. I did use various LLMs to help with it, but the final editing had to be done by me, and I've rewritten most parts so they sound better as well as changed the examples generated by the LLM. Additionally, over time I've grown tired of the overall architecture, because writing generic lessons seems like the old way of doing things. I'm not a teacher, and so I was writing these lessons as I've learned things myself, so it seems like an approach better suited for someone very familiar with teaching Chinese but with less experience on the technical side.

The New Approach

Now I'm mostly experimenting with utilizing LLMs to generate content on the fly, tailored exactly to the student. Right now I have a new section for reading practice which generates simple stories using just the words the student has already learned. It also includes a question to test comprehension as well as an English translation.

These stories are still somewhat strange, though I suppose that's mainly because of my limited vocabulary. I've started adding a new category with words I'm already familiar with as well as ones I would deem useful when traveling around Taiwan (mainly related to ordering coffee/milk tea), as well as a couple of names so that the characters in the story aren't all called Xiao/Small.

Further Steps

I'll probably implement a listening exercise section pretty soon, because I can mainly use the stories generated for reading and then run them through a TTS engine to play to the student, with the question used for testing comprehension. I'll then have to think of a way to add these to the review section, because it would be quite nice if one generally just has to do the reviews and the system then automatically generates exercises for reading/listening.

I still have to think of a good way to do exercises for writing/speaking. I've done some experiments with building a voice agent on ElevenLabs, but so far this didn't work too well because it generally doubled words (I'm guessing the LLM generates pinyin which their TTS then also emits) and spoke far too quickly. Though maybe I can fix these by getting more familiar with their API, and I do have to say it was kind of fun to talk to an AI for 5 minutes, though it did show me how limited my abilities to express myself in Chinese are.

Adiós, べン