Decided to finally check it out today and toss it some nuanced questions about Japanese. The answers I got blew me away. Not all of them have been totally correct but that’s why I wanted to start this thread for vis into some of the questions:
IE:
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Me: explain the verb 終わらせる
GPT: 終わらせる (owaraseru) is a Japanese verb that means “to finish” or “to end.” It is the causative form of the verb 終わる (owaru), which means “to finish” or “to end.” The causative form is used to indicate that someone or something is causing an action to happen, in this case causing something to finish or end.
For example, if you wanted to say “I will finish my homework,” you could use the verb 終わらせる and say 「宿題を終わらせる。」(shukudai o owaraseru). This literally means “I will cause my homework to finish.”
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Me: Whats the difference between 終わりましょう and 終わらせましょう
GPT: 終わりましょう (owarimashou) and 終わらせましょう (owarasemashou) are both ways to say “let’s finish” in Japanese, but there is a slight difference in meaning between the two phrases.
終わりましょう is the volitional form of the verb 終わる (owaru), which means “to finish.” The volitional form is used to express a suggestion or a desire to do something. So 終わりましょう can be translated as “let’s finish” or “let’s bring an end to something.”
終わらせましょう is the volitional form of the verb 終わらせる (owaraseru), which means “to finish” or “to end.” As I mentioned earlier, 終わらせる is the causative form of the verb 終わる, so it indicates that someone or something is causing the action to happen. Therefore, 終わらせましょう can be translated as “let’s finish” or “let’s bring an end to something,” with the implication that we are the ones causing it to happen.
So the main difference between the two phrases is that 終わらせましょう implies that the speaker is taking an active role in causing the action to happen, while 終わりましょう does not have this implication.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
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Anyone else utilizing this?
7 comments
I did that too and it blew me away at how human it sounded. I’m not normally the type to get worried about technology (I’m an IT Director) but it even gave me the butterflies there. ahaha
I asked it some generic questions and then some advanced questions (not in japanese, I’m too bad for that) and it did seem to confidently give me both right and wrong answers. haha Seriously though, it felt so human like.
>Not all of them have been totally correct
That sounds rather useless *as a resource*, and that’s the end of story, if you ask me…
Hoping someone can confirm whether the answer in the OP is in fact true.
Please use search my good man.
This is posted about constantly.
Every time the consensus is the same.
ChatGPT is amazing.
But it also manages to make *confidently* wrong answers. So long as this isn’t fixed and you aren’t asking it questions in a field where being wrong can be demonstrated immediately (e.g. programming), relying on ChatGPT for explanations when learning could seriously impede your learning.
If you have regular classes with a Japanese teacher, that’s one thing. They’ll tell you you’re wrong and it’ll end there. But if you’re a self-learner, you have to do due diligence and spend time to counterverify the answer — a counterproductive endeavour because you’ll need to go through the same materials as you’d have gone through if you hadn’t relied on ChatGPT from the beginning.
I feel like ChatGPT itself creates accounts on reddit to promote itself here…
In this specific case, the answer is correct, though that’s mostly because the question was dead easy. By contrast, if it got it *wrong*, my already low opinion of ChatGPT as a Japanese learning aid would have gotten even worse.
We already had several posts so far where ever so slightly more nuanced questions were asked, and the answers were not only bullshit, but confidently bullshit. Which is *really* not good.
Plus, even you mentioned in your post that sometimes the answers are wrong. Which as a learning aid is very bad. If the resource isn’t consistently correct at least most of the time, there’s a high chance it will feed misinformation to a learner, and as the saying goes, knowing with confidence that which is incorrect is worse than knowing nothing at all.