Need a Korean Tutor? Hire ChatGPT!

Hi, I’m Ashley, and I currently work as a speaking partner for students enrolled in beginner-level Korean. No, I’m not trying to advertise my Korean lessons here—though you’re always welcome!

I’ve been reading from internet sources lately about how people use ChatGPT(for convenience, I call it ”Chat”) to learn a new language. I, at first, considered it unserious. Chat is a “Chat” after all. Then, my high school friend who is currently in Australia brought it up during our regular catching up conversation a few weeks ago. “I unsubscribed Duolingo premium recently. Chat is so much better and it's FREE” —FYI, she’s been on a Duolingo streak for a year!

So I grew curious.

Is Chat a good language tutor?

This article is about me simulating Korean speaking practice from a beginner's perspective for the past week and my recommendations when using Chat as your language teacher. Spoiler alert: it is, in fact, so much more worth than many paid language apps.

Methodology:

To begin with, I landed on the first option of Albert Tan’s “Learn Korean with GPT”, “Teach me a Korean phrase for beginners,” to test out the quality of (1) the content Chat produces, (2) its pronunciation, and (3) its accent and tone. Assuming you’re a beginner, I highly recommend looking up an existing OpenAI Chatbot by replacing “Korean” with your target language. Trust me, I tried using multiple prompts I scraped from ChatGPT communities, but the output from those prompts was often inconsistent and required far too much customization, which may come across daunting as a non-expert in the language.

Content:

When I selected the “Teach me a Korean phrase for beginners” option, it provided instructions for the very basic greetings (안녕하세요). What was impressive, however, was that it further offered a breakdown into meaning and grammatical function. No other language app I know of does this, but it is an important factor since Korean is an inflected language, meaning its interpretation fluctuates according to the word’s grammatical variations.

Next, it asked me:

Want to try it in a short dialogue next? Or learn the casual version too?

Another green flag spotted. Korean consists of formal and casual language, and the trained Chat I used naturally suggested learning the casual version, which might not have been possible if I had not known that Korean has both formal and casual versions.

Fast forwarding, I answered:

Want to try with a short dialogue! I want to practice in real-time, interactively by actually speaking with you.

Do not miss out “interactively.” This keyword generates the desirable outcome shown below. You can further personalize the settings of the conversation.

After every answer of mine, Chat (1) generated a brief feedback to my answer, (2) responded with English translations, grammatical breakdown, and other usage examples, and (3) nudged me to answer back. I found this structure very useful, as learning the words and grammar separately causes trouble when it comes to a conversational setting, where you have to apply different grammar for different nuances (as mentioned, Korean is inflectional). Practicing with phrases while learning the grammatical underlogic sounded like a strong strategy to me as a tutor.

I proceeded to generate a series of conversations at a restaurant and beauty clinic, which I used in some of my classes to create a conversation tree with students. It was basically a chain of me starting the conversation and the student responding from a pool of answers Chat picked out, but students responded that it was much more interactive and reflective of grammar lessons than reading through a plain practice sheet.

With this, I could conclude the content quality of this bot itself was 4.5/5.

Yet, I warn you it is NOT perfect. I said the content itself was great. According to the individual testing results reported by my students, when asked for a situation-specific conversation practice, the bot occasionally missed out the English interpretations of its responses. It corrects itself when asked to retry with English translations provided; still it is a flaw.

Pronunciation

I evaluated pronunciation from two aspects: (1) whether its pronunciation is natural and unflawed, and (2) if it corrects my pronunciation when I am wrong. I did so by separately conversing in Korean with the bot.

Practice free conversation with me. Respond to me with a short feedback to my part followed by an appropriate answer. Make sure the conversation continues.

Chat was amazingly accurate at pronouncing the words. I have so far spotted no errors in its speech. It, however, could not evaluate the correctness of my speech. I find this not a Korean-specific issue, as the reason it could not evaluate my pronunciation was if I said it incorrectly, it would process it as a different word in the first place, which is inherently a system matter.

On such grounds, I would rate Chat’s pronunciation 3/5. This is not to claim that it is not useful for pronunciation training, as you can still learn by comparing yours with the Chat’s or mirroring its ability to process your response correctly. But compared to a human tutor or different language apps, it is definitely not the outstanding choice for improving pronunciation.

Tone and Accent:

The trickiest part was tone and accent, as these are the most subtle components when learning a language. Although Chat was quite capable of mimicking some parts of the accent, its tone remained largely robotic and static and missed some details. For instance, when it was supposed to end with an escalating accent, it spoke in a monotone. On the flipside, its ability to switch persona allowed learners to practice with a teenage boy, college student, or even a Korean professor.

Overall:

The biggest downside of using Chat as a language tutor was its inability to replicate the native speakers’ accent, tone, and nuance. This, however, did not overshadow its merits when it came to learning Korean. I believe this is because Korean is not heavily accent-based, which means, if you are practicing with any other language whose meaning depends on accent—for instance, Mandarin—it is not recommended.

In short, Chat is not flawless as a language tutor, but for Korean beginners, it is one of the most powerful, flexible, and surprisingly interactive free tools available. Using prompt hacks and supplement pronunciation practice source, Chat can easily outshine many paid apps in helping you build confidence and fluency.