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Even for Chinese people, Journey to the West is a somewhat difficult text because it belongs to classical literature. Using some children's books published in recent years, and progressing gradually, might be a better approach?

This is extremely interesting, great idea. Really both thumbs up. Looking for more ideas/lifehack approaches to learning via LLMs.

Cool idea! You mentioned the model struggling with Chinese a bit. Have you tried any Chinese models, e.g. DeepSeek or GLM? I imagine they probably have a lot more Chinese in the pretraining. (And their English is certainly fine too!)

Interesting concept! Think this would be quite cool to explore. Personally am very interested in language learning concepts / apps.

My first concerns though:

1. How can the system know which words I already know.

2. To what degree will I misunderstand the meaning of words.

3. Somewhat related to 2, how inaccurate will be description / explanation of words be.

This is a really smart idea.

I’m trying to learn to speak Chinese and not read it yet. The issue is most of the language learning apps have a focus on characters. I feel like I just want to see the pinyin. Maybe I don’t know what I need, but I haven’t found the right tool.

There's a language learning method where you just listen to audio, until you develop a basic familiarity with the language. (Then learn reading and writing later.)

You listen to audio you don't understand yet, and over time your brain begins to pick up the patterns. It takes a lot of time but you can do it in the background, because that processing happens subconsciously. So you can get that time "for free".

I learned it from this guy https://alljapanesealltheti.me/index.html

But he got it from linguist Stephen Krashen and his Input Hypothesis of language acquisition. (i.e. that the way babies and kids learn languages, thru osmosis, works for adults too.)

I think the ideal solution is somewhere in the middle, starting with something like Pimsleur which is the same idea (audio and repetition) but more structured and focused, to give you that "seed" of vocabulary and grammar, before you flesh it out with the "long tail" of the language.

Thanks! I think getting comfortable with characters fairly early is important, as it helps shift your mindset into the right place. That said, I don’t think this project really works until you’re comfortable with at least ~60 characters.