Recently, there have been a lot of posts and comments advocating for the use of LLMs such as ChatGPT and MTL such as Google Translate and DeepL as a way to help with learning (for example, this post and this post). Now, personally, use whatever the fuck you want. This is just the opinion of a random Japanese learner on the internet, but it seems to be an opinion that is shared by myself and quite a few others on this subreddit.

That opinion being Resources like ChatGPT and Google Translate and other MTLs/LLMs are holding your language abilities back.

Now, I think that any resource that you can leverage to your advantage can be well-utilized if used correctly, but the problem is that people don't use them properly and thus, the cons of using such software far outweigh the pros. While one can argue that ChatGPT has come a long way and doesn't tend to hallucinate as much as it used to, I will be one to argue that relying on something that can still hallucinate, especially as a beginner with semblance of what is right and what is wrong, can work against you rather than help you.

For those of you who disagree or think you have a rebuttal against my claims, feel free to comment them. But here we go.

1. ChatGPT is not a knowledge-base. It's an LLM. It will hallucinate.

To provide a definition of hallucination in this context, a hallucination is a false or misleading response generated by any A.I. or LLM. Platforms like ChatGPT and Deepseek are LLMs, models that give predictive answers based on the training data they've been given. They, therefore, cannot be relied upon to give reliable answers 100% of the time. As a beginner, it will be hard to differentiate between what is actually true and what is false. I have a couple of examples from u/AdrixG who posted links to these two comment threads where people have advocated for the usage of ChatGPT, only for what ChatGPT says to be wrong. Example 1 and Example 2. Beginners will not be able to notice these sorts of mistakes and unless they use alternate or external resources, it'd be hard to notice. In that case, why use A.I. at all if you run the risk of it being incorrect? And if you're exposed to incorrect explanations all of the time without knowing whether or not it is incorrect and you continually expose yourself to situations that incur wrongful misunderstandings of how words and grammar work, then you will slowly ingrain these misunderstandings in your mind and it'd be hard to correct. This is NOT to say that these misunderstandings are permanent, but depending on how ingrained they are, they can probably take a long time to correct, so while you could still reverse any misunderstandings implanted by A.I. with due time, why even run the risk of using A.I. when you could avoid it and organically learn from the start?

2. Immediately shoving complex sentences into A.I. for explanations can hinder problem solving skills.

When it comes to trying to understand complex sentences that you can't solve, even if you know every word, the temptation to immediately shove it into A.I. becomes more than understandable, but doesn't really improve problem-solving skills. Why try to solve it when you could just shove it into A.I. and have it be explained to you? Because you squander any opportunity to improve your own problem-solving abilities. Now, I understand that for sentences, there will be many where, even if you know every word or grammar structure, there will be a chance that you won't understand the sentence. But in my opinion, this is a natural byproduct of reading and it requires reading more for you to be able to build up an understanding of what you previously couldn't understand. Also

People underestimate the amount of problem solving that reading requires in order to figure out how the puzzle pieces fit together and in which contexts they're supposed to fit. By using A.I., you may receive a "helpful" (depends on what your definition of the word "helpful" is) analysis or translation, which can help to prime you for the next time you encounter a similar sentence, but if you shove every sentence that you don't know into A.I., you hinder your chances to build problem solving skills, which is very important for reading and building up comprehension.

Problem solving is important because it builds up critical thinking skills which can help with things like trying to understand grammar in certain contexts or with deconstructing sentences. Language learning, like any skill, is a skill that will present the learner with a lot of problems that they must solve, and immediately resorting to A.I. when dealing with these problems won't let you build up the skills necessary to tackle future problems.

Now, you may be asking "What should I do when encountering a complex sentence?" and to that, I say to either take more time to figure out what is going on or outright skip the sentence. The sentence or passage may be beyond your skill level and skipping it is fine. You'll be able to understand more as you interact more with the language. There may be materials out there, light novels and such, where skipping a sentence may derail your understanding of what is going on and the lack of visuals in such materials won't really help to mitigate this problem either. In this case, it is fine to take some extra time to figure out what is going on. Re-read the previous sentences to learn the context, for example. I personally used to use https://massif.la/ja to see how words can be used in other sentences in order to build up a well-rounded understanding of any words or grammar that I had trouble with, thus allowing me to successfully interpret what was going on within the context of my immersion material. Immediately shoving it into ChatGPT may provide you with wrong explanations and ChatGPT may not even be able to interpret the sentence correctly because Japanese is highly contextual, hence why ChatGPT may hallucinate and provide wrongful insights and nuances.

3. Onto MTL, languages aren't 1:1 and therefore they cannot translate directly.

This last point is more of a dig at MTL, so things like Google Translate, DeepL, and other famous translating software. Now, for this point, I'd like to link a tiny bit to an article by morg.systems who details pros and cons of using MTL (there are more cons than pros). While Google Translate and DeepL can be used for people who need it outside of language-learning cases, it is still quite problematic in that there are numerous issues as the author of the article describes. Such cons include the fact that "MTLs do not know how to deal with incorrect Japanese. They assume whatever garbage you type in the box is 'correct' and try to find whatever meaning they can grab, whether it makes sense or not," or the fact that "Japanese is a very contextual language and doesn’t have gendered words or obvious pronouns most of the time. It also doesn’t have a distinction between singular or plural. For this reason most MTLs are simply unable to cope with the lack of context or unable to infer the context from the text, so they will make up some stuff (gender, plurality, etc) and it will often be wrong." (Both quoted from the site. You can read the site for further reasons why MTL can be bad).

MTL can also be quite misleading or bad with its translations and if you don't know what the Japanese is actually saying, then you might run into some problems. I actually have my own example I'd like to present in the form of this image. The text was taken from the visual novel Sousaku Kanojo no Ren'ai Koushiki. Here, you can see that in the image that it completely messes up the last line in terms of translation.

I'd also like to provide one last thing, which I think is very important too. Japanese and English are not 1:1. Each language has their own grammar rules with their own nuances. Languages can have multiple interpretations and nuances depending on the context. Whenever you translate a sentence from Japanese to English using MTL, it will not translate directly, rather, it will find the closest approximate way to deliver the sentence in English, using English grammar rules. It disregards the rules of Japanese grammar and finds the closest English equivalent. Thus, if you use MTL to constantly interpret sentences for you, you may end up risking associating Japanese grammar points and vocab with the closest English equivalent, which may have entirely different functions and nuances. Therefore, you may end up misunderstanding the function of a certain grammar point because the closest English equivalent that it translates into may not share the same nuances or functions that the Japanese grammar point has. This, in my opinion, is the biggest flaw when using MTL to learn a language.

So how do I solve this?

Simple. Don't extensively rely on MTL or ChatGPT. The consequences that come with extensively using such things as the main interpreter for your learning are reversible but that reversibility is only possible if you give up using these sorts of software and start doing things in a more organic way.

How do I learn in a more organic way?

In order to learn more organically, you need to learn to interpret the language by yourself. Sentences are puzzles and each part of the sentence is a puzzle piece. You need to put these puzzle pieces together in a way that makes sense. These puzzle pieces can be identified using dictionaries, google, and other resources (Even ChatGPT and DeepL/Google Translate have their benefits like translating the Japanese definition of a word or phrase or for understanding the meanings of individual words, but not for the entire sentence). Language is all about building up your own understanding. Language is a tool for forming messages, but said messages can be interpreted in different ways and multiple people can have different understandings of the same message, so it's fine to interpret the sentence in your own way. Your understanding of a sentence might be different from others but by exposing yourself to the language in various contexts, you will build up a well-rounded understanding of the language that aligns with everybody else's understandings.

But J-E dictionaries basically translate the word from Japanese to English, so why is single word translation allowed and not sentence translation?

Well, you see, translating individual words from Japanese to English is nowhere near as bad as full sentence translation in my opinion because translating individual words and grammar points is like identifying the puzzle pieces. You've identified what the puzzle pieces are, but you still need to figure out how they fit together, something that you're robbed of when doing full sentence translations. See, when we start out learning a 2nd language, we're always referencing back to our first language in our heads to understand how the puzzle pieces fit together. As we learn more of the language, we slowly start to build up a model of how our second language works, seeing the differences between our first language and the language we're trying to learn, and thus we reference back to our first language less and less. You slowly build up a natural understanding of how the language you're trying to learn works, and if you use sentence translations all the time, you will start to slowly misunderstand things and thus correlate ideas from the mental model of your first language with the ideas from the mental model of the language you're trying to learn, and thus you begin to misinterpret things until you solidify it more and more. Of course, I must reiterate that such misunderstandings are reversible using organic and unassisted immersion/input (so immersing yourself in content without using MTL or ChatGPT), but it might take a long time depending on how ingrained the bad habits are in your mind.

Anyways, this is the end of my little ramble, so if you have anything you'd like to rebuke or correct me on, tell me in the comments below. If you've made it to the end of this and are still not convinced by my arguments, then by all means, you're free to continue however you'd like. My opinions can be completely wrong and if they are, you're free to correct me or discuss about it in the comments. Other than that, I might make a post elaborating on strategies that one can use to avoid using MTL or ChatGPT. With that, I bid you all adieu for now.

EDIT: I wanted to make a section on using things like English subs to learn Japanese.

4. Why is using English subs bad for learning Japanese?

I personally don't think that watching anime with English subs is going to teach you Japanese. If you somehow use English subs but you focus more on the Japanese audio and only use the English subs occasionally to get the definitions for words, a case could be made there, but most people tend to ignore the Japanese audio and only focus on the English subtitles and then this is why people who say that they've been watching anime for years using English subs have only been able to pick up words here and there.

Now, dual subs on the other hand, is much better than pure English subs because you have the Japanese which you can focus on to try and solve and the English subs underneath to give you translations for words and stuff. I, however, think that this falls under the argument back in point 3 that I made for MTL.

"But you're using J-E dictionaries to translate words to put together to understand the Japanese, so why won't this work?"

Because you're not utilizing that problem solving ability, thus you won't be able to improve your problem solving skills. English subs are just translations/interpretations of the Japanese language and thus, if you were given the English translation, you're not given any opportunity to figure out what is going on and are thus force-fed interpretations of the language that give close approximations of what the Japanese is trying to say, and thus if you correlate the close English approximation translation with the Japanese grammar point's function, you will therefore miss any nuances presented by the Japanese grammar point and by extension, misunderstand the function of the Japanese grammar point.

This is why, when learning Japanese, you should be using Japanese subtitles with a J-E dictionary rather than dual subs (which can provide some benefit but not as much as pure Japanese subtitles) or English subtitles (which provide little to no benefit for learning Japanese.