I’m wanting to start learning Spanish, and I’m looking for a free option that isn’t Duolingo.

I don’t like the gamey fomo aspect of it.

Anyone have a favorite place they found?

  • felixwhynot@lemmy.world
    8·
    4 days ago

    My problem with LLMs for this use is that the language learner is not an expert and can be misled by a bot’s hallucinations

    • ikt@aussie.zone
      1·
      4 days ago

      are you able to point some out on a1/b2 content on mistral for me? im interested to see if you’ve found some

      • trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 days ago

        They probably cant because they dient storend time using AI to learn a language their already proficient in. That exactly why is problematic. You can’t know if the explanations are good unless you get an actual human who knows the language to verify it.

        • ikt@aussie.zone
          1·
          3 days ago

          so the irony is that you guys are hallucinating an answer confidently, AI is really good at translation and language

          https://www.deepl.com/en for example is far better than google translate was because they leapt onto ML/AI earlier

          If you don’t want to straight up use Mistral/EuroLLM which are trained on European languages:

          The company, which launched two years ago, released on Tuesday Mistral Large 3, which the startup claims maintains the same level of performance in “a large number of languages,” particularly European ones.

          “Most AI labs focus on their native language, but Mistral Large 3 was trained on a wide variety of languages, making advanced AI useful for billions who speak different native languages,” the company said in a press release.

          https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/12/02/mistral-europes-ai-champion-releases-new-smaller-frontier-models-heres-what-to-know

          If you don’t want to directly use a chatbot there’s also https://morpheem.org/ and https://languatalk.com/try-langua which uses AI but builds it around the games specifically, vs just straight up telling the AI bot what to do

          • trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world
            1·
            3 days ago

            AI is really good at translating, but not nearly as good at explaining grammar. I have tried before to get a mistral tutor explain to me when a verb takes the gender of the direct object or of the indirect object in Hindi. It gave me a wildly different answer than chatgpt.

            • ikt@aussie.zone
              1·
              3 days ago

              yeah mistral is weak like that, I would say they’re at least a year away from chatgpt and claude but they just don’t have the compute

              I would recommend to use AI for basic games like translate sentence, anki style flash cards, fill in the sentence, eg. unlike duolingo it won’t annoy the hell out of you with ads and energy