Accuracy of AI for basic questions?

Hi all, I’ve been trying to learn some basic Japanese for about a month and am wondering how useful/accurate chatbots have been for folks’ learning. There’s no replacement for just speaking with someone else—but in terms of ease of access, chatbots have been able to quickly and concisely answer a lot of questions I have as a beginning learner.

I’m hoping to get a sense for how accurate these answers are because at times it can be hard to verify myself. I’ve included an example below—I’m also just interested in everyone else’s experience for how they’ve used (or avoided) chatbots for their learning.

Here is an example I’m hoping more advanced learners could comment on:

**Me**: “Can you translate the following: “I go on a walk in the park with Becky” into two different Japanese sentences: one where the emphasis is placed on “Becky” and another where the emphasis is placed on “park”?”

**Bot**: “Yes, I can translate the sentence “I go on a walk in the park with Becky” into two different Japanese sentences with different emphasis.

1. Emphasis on “Becky”: “私はベッキーと公園で散歩に行きます” (Watashi wa Becky to kouen de sanpo ni ikimasu). In this sentence, the emphasis is on “Becky” because her name comes directly after the subject “私は” (Watashi wa).

2. Emphasis on “park”: “私は公園でベッキーと散歩に行きます” (Watashi wa kouen de Becky to sanpo ni ikimasu). In this sentence, the emphasis is on “park” because the location “公園で” (kouen de) comes directly after the subject “私は” (Watashi wa).”

**Me**: “With regards to sentence 1: is it valid to say “ベッキは私と公園で散歩に行きます”? If so, how does this change the connotation? With regards to sentence 2: is it valid to say “公園をベッキーと私は散歩に行きます”? If so, how does this change the connotation?”

**Bot**: “Yes, both of the sentences you suggested are grammatically valid, but the word order is different from the original sentences, and the emphasis is also different, which changes the connotation.

1. “ベッキーは私と公園で散歩に行きます” (Becky wa watashi to kouen de sanpo ni ikimasu) means “Becky goes on a walk in the park with me.” In this sentence, the emphasis is on “Becky” because her name is at the beginning of the sentence. This sentence puts more emphasis on Becky’s action of going on a walk with the speaker.

2. “公園をベッキーと私は散歩に行きます” (Kouen wo Becky to watashi wa sanpo ni ikimasu) means “Becky and I go on a walk in the park.” In this sentence, the emphasis is on “park” because it is the object of the sentence. The sentence puts more emphasis on the location of the walk, rather than who is going on the walk.”

Also, for posterity, this is the Snapchat AI bot, lmao. It just happens to be the easiest thing to access for me, and it’s free… but I have to imagine stuff like GPT-4 would be way better, even.