As I’m writing this, I'm sat in the back of my cousins car, driving through the chaotic, cacophonous streets of Ludhiana, a large, sprawling city in the heart of the Indian state of Punjab. I am midway through a trip to visit family here, a trip that I tend to make every year or two. My father moved to England from Punjab in the early 1980s. It was only ever intended to be a temporary visit, but he has remained there ever since, building a life, career and family, far away from home. Whilst we visited India when we were young, me and my siblings never had the chance to learn our father's two native tongues, Punjabi and Hindi. It was something I always felt compelled to address.

Since submitting my PhD thesis two years ago, I've been learning Hindi, primarily through online tutoring on Preply. Progress has been steady, despite the fact I'm terrible at doing homework set by my tutor (if you are reading, I’m sorry, Shivaani!). I've recently found a tool, however, which has revolutionised my learning - using a large language model, Claude, as a personal language tutor and learning companion.

Claude is a family of large language models (LLM) developed by Anthropic, many of which are currently world-leading. These AI models are neural networks trained on vast amounts of textual data, allowing them to understand the context and relationships between words. LLMs are creating enormous interest for their potential to transform many aspects of daily life, such as assisting software developers in writing and debugging code more efficiently, automating routine tasks like email drafting and scheduling, or revolutionizing customer service through intelligent chatbots. In this post, I'll share how I've been using Claude to help me learn Hindi.

One of its biggest strengths lies in its ability to generate engaging learning materials. I first started using generative AI for Hindi with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, where I used it to generate stories which I could then translate for practice. It's fun - you can personalise them, and then read the story as you translate (my personal favourite was the story of Sanjay, a cricketer for India who moonlighted as a Bollywood actor, until one day, his secret was discovered 😅). This was with an earlier model (GPT-3.5), and the stories often contained many small mistakes which my tutor would need to correct before I started. Now, when I do this with Claude Sonnet 3.5, the stories are essentially mistake-free. Beyond these stories, it helps to create personalised homework assignments and other translation exercises tailored to my learning needs.

I've found it incredibly useful for breaking down complex grammar structures. It can offer multiple perspectives until the concept resonates, and provides detailed explanations accompanied by practical examples. Each sentence can be analyzed in detail, showing both its literal meaning (like how 'mujhe chai peeni chahiye' directly translates to 'to-me tea drink should) and its natural English equivalent ('I should drink tea'). Typically, I’ve found it really challenging to rapidly access this information online.

Day to day, my family speak Punjabi to each other rather than Hindi - although they can understand me speaking Hindi, this can make it quite difficult for me to understand them. I’ve found Claude helpful for this, because I can ask it to give me the Punjabi version of a phrase in Hindi, with helpful explanations that go beyond Google Translate. It is also able to easily switch between scripts (for example, Devanagari and Latin script). And most importantly, unlike any normal tutor or learning buddy, Claude is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and responds immediately. It responds thoughtfully, and never judges when responding, giving the user freedom to continue asking questions until understanding arrives.

My intuition is that whilst LLMs are particularly useful at a beginner level (as I am), as you get more and more proficient in a language, their utility may decrease. And of course, there is only so much a text-based tutor can help with learning a language - nothing will replace real time conversation with native speakers. The nuances of pronunciation, the rhythm of natural conversation, and the subtle cultural clues that emerge through face-to-face interaction remain essential components of achieving fluency.

While I'm still early in my Hindi learning journey, I'm excited to see how AI tools like Claude continue to evolve as learning companions. As an example of this evolution, Duolingo now have a new subscription tier, Duolingo Max, powered by GPT-4. If you're interested in learning more about Claude and the future of LLMs, I'd recommend having a play around, or listening to this episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, with Dario Amodei (the CEO of Anthropic), Amanda Askell (a philosopher, responsible for shaping Claude's personality), and Chris Olah (co-founder at Anthropic, reverse engineering neural networks).