Conversations with ChatGPT

There seem to be a lot of posts here where people ask ChatGPT things about Japanese in another language and comment on how inaccurate it’s explanations are, treating it as a tutor rather than as a conversation partner. I’ve been trying to simply talk with it about about anything in Japanese recently and while it sometimes returns blatantly factually incorrect information, given that I’ve tried it in two languages I am profficient in, one far more obscure than Japanese, and it’s answers were always in idiomatic, correct language, though a bit stiff and formal, I can hopefully assume that the language it produces is correct though my level of Japanese isn’t high enough to evaluate that properly.

I’ve also been trying to ask it some things about Japanese in Japanese, not so much wanting explanations, but asking it whether it thinks a certain phrasing is natural and how it would phrase things. Most of the time it comes with phrasings which I myself find are more natural than what I would produce but I simply couldn’t think of myself due too not a right balance of output to input due to not having any Japanese friends:

This is a sample conversation:

> – I: まあ、あなただとしたら、「I woke up too early because the sun was too bright.」って文を日本語で言わなくちゃいけなければどうする?
> – ChatGPt:「太陽が明るすぎて早く起きてしまった」という文になります。
> – I:そうだ!言い分ですね、自分が思いつけなかったなんて。
> – ChatGPT: いいえ、問題ありません。言い回しや表現方法は人それぞれですから、いろいろな言い方があると思います。ただし、相手が理解しやすいように、文法や表現方法には注意が必要です
> – I: それでも、あなたの言い回しのほうがいいと思うけど。もっと自然な感じがする
> – ChatGPT: ありがとうございます。自然な表現を使うことは、コミュニケーションをスムーズにするために重要です。言葉の選び方や言い回しには、文脈や相手に合わせた適切な表現を使うことが大切です。
> – I: ね、僕の最後の文で、「感じがするから」のほうがもっと自然だったよね?
> – ChatGPT: はい、そうです。「感じがするから」という表現は、直訳すると「because it feels like」となりますが、よく使われる自然な表現です。また、「感じがする」という表現は、直感的に感じたことを表すのに適しています。
> – I: で、あなただったら、その文の内容はどう表現した?
> – ChatGPT: もし私がその文の内容を表現する場合は、以下のように表現するかもしれません。「感覚的には、あなたの言い回しがもっと自然に聞こえますね。」
> – I:ああ、それもいい言い回しだと思う。賢いAIだね、あなたは
> – ChatGPT: ありがとうございます。何か他にお力になれることがあれば、お知らせください。

As you can see my language has some errors in it such as “言い分” for what obviously should be “いい文” and “あなただったら” rather than “あなただとしたら” would probably be better too. I’m not sure whether it just listened through this or didn’t even notice.

Any thoughts about it’s responses? Is the Japanese even grammatically correct and does what it says about phrasings make any sense?

4 comments
  1. I can’t comment on the accuracy (probably best to get a native speaker for that), but I’d like to ask what GPT model you used? Was it 3.5 or 4?

  2. Chatgpt is not ready to be used for this, it’s a waste of time. Might as well grade Google translate responses.

  3. 太陽が明るすぎて doesn’t sound like something an actual person would say, it feels like a direct translation from English. I would expect something more like 日差しが眩しい。

  4. what we really need is someone who is good at making friends, giving you all a tutorial on that

    I’m sure there is someone in Japan who is bored as you all are who are turning to this chatbot

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