So there are two worlds. The world of the Hungarian language classroom, where everyone understands each other well enough, and the world of real life, where learners of Hungarian are idiots. Like, they can’t understand nothing and no one can understand them.
So, having graduated from the classroom world years ago and unable to step into the real world, I experiment. Experimenting worked fine in the classroom world. Am I the best in the class? Ok, the experiment worked.
My experiments in the real world are dismal though. Sure, my mother-in-law, sister-in-law and niece can understand me but that is about it. And what more is there to discuss other than food, food poisoning and weather. (See the heat rotted the food and now I am going to the bathroom every hour and that is why I am not going to the aqua park with you.)
My italki tutor gave me an assignment this week with songs from the avant-garde metal band Thy Catafalque. Yeah, I don’t listen to heavy metal, but I chose one of the songs that had a good video on YouTube (Köd Utánam) and figured, ok I can pick out a word or two, I will try to transcribe this song and figure it out.
So yah, well that real life thing. Too hard. So I went to my Claude AI account and I said help me with this. My account is free and I have instructed it to use the Socratic method when I ask it questions about what I am learning in Hungarian, so it’s not just a translation or research program, instead it nudges me to figure stuff out on my own.
But yah, my free account annoyed me, because it gave too many hints, and I didn’t want any hints, I wanted to train my ear.
So I logged onto my husband’s Claude account, which is a $20/mo account, and tried out Fable, which is included for at least the next week so people can get hooked. I want you to know I got so hooked I worked on that song five hours straight with it. I ended up getting through maybe 39 seconds of the lyrics more or less, but I was in the flow, it was so pleasurable working with that damn machine. Finally it told me to stop and rest a moment, and it was 1 am on a work night so I relented. Maybe it was tired too. I have no idea how much of its concept window I used in that chat, I am not used to using the paid account nor Fable, I certainly never sensed any degradation.
Anyways, one of the things I realized is that what it did was open my ears to the dearth of possibilities of what I am hearing. It was asking me questions like “could there be an n-k- or a b in that syllable?” Or “knock the table between those two words and count how many syllables lies between them that you haven’t been able to identify.” Sometimes it would get into grammar, “well that word has suspicious grammar in it. You see anything wrong with what you guessed?” Or it would notice when I noticed some trait of Hungarian connected speech or some other outside-my-little-box discovery. It would say “take note of this aspect that you just discovered.” We talked in Hungarian the whole time (we started out at the beginning of the chat talking in English because I thought that would lessen the mental load but I soon realized that if I totally thought in Hungarian that the mental load was actually less. I just told it to keep its comments short, so it would be more understandable.) So we talked with each other in Hungarian. Sometimes it would get into the semantics or style of the phrases I was putting forth as guesses, “ya, that word you gave is fitting for a poet like Kátai.” Even if it wasn’t the right word, it would tie in all the ways that a person understands what probably amounts to telepathy in everyday life.
One of the valuable things about it was how f-ing patient it was. 5 hours of guiding me through 39 seconds. Any human would have long ago sprinkled obvious hints to just get things moving along. But its hints were maddening. It knew that if I relied on its hints that I wouldn’t be training my own ear. It loved offering absolutely wrong suggestions. Because then I would be forced to listen hard and finally say, “nice try, but no, it definitely wasn’t those possibilities, now it’s my turn to take a guess.” As if we were taking turns guessing, but I knew it knew, it was just playing with me.
A lot of times it would get all excited if I was sure about something, and would let me move on, and then I would realize when listening to the next few seconds many times that something I had figured out an hour prior was wrong, and that I suddenly could hear what it was for real, and I would tell it and it would get more excited, of course. Part of its genius was saying the exact right thing to make me press the play button on the timeline on the music track one more time, again, again, like an excited rat getting its heroin fix.
Anyways, I just wanted to share my experience, in case it is useful.
