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Can AI be used to learn languages?

Posted on December 9, 2025

Some languages have more regular prosidy than others, or are more phonetic than others.

English and French have a common phonomenon that doesn’t really exist in Romanian (and probably not much in German, Dutch, Estonian or Hungarian either.) That is homographs.  Two words, with different meanings, that spell the same but have different meanings.  Sometimes, the AI can guess the pronunciation of a homonymn by its context, but often AI gets it wrong.  One example in English is read.  If pronounced one way, read is in the present tense, another way it happened in the past.

I read every day. 

Alone we would assume it is present tense, and would sound like reed.  But in a paragraph, read would be  in the past tense, and sound like red.

When I was a teenager, I loved books.  I read every day.  Now, I don’t feel like I have as much time, but somehow I still end up watching a lot of series.

In English, the prosody can change the meaning of a sentence. The prosody and pronunciation of homographs are often obvious to a native speaking humans.  But, what about when a computer tries to tell us how to pronounce things?  One confusing article about how to pronounce Marriot shows the AI making all kinds of mistakes.

(In short, Marriot rhymes with chariot.)

But, listening to the AI, we hear humorous inconsistencies.  It is easier 

https://fortune.com/2025/09/29/david-marriott-correct-pronunciation-hotel-chain/
 
It is a video on how to pronounce Marriott.  Basically, Marriot rhymes with Eliot and chariot.  Or, like “Mary-it.” 
I was interested because I read a lot about Marriott in business books.  But listening to the AI audio is just cringe, because the AI changes the pronunciation back and forth, not learning what it just said.
 
The AI often pronounces it Mare-ee-AHT.  There are even how to pronounce videos getting to the top of Google pronouncing the word incorrectly.
 
With AI suggesting the wrong pronunciations, enunciations, and prosody, it is a poor tool for learning languages.  We tried an AI learning app for Dutch, the we progressed much slower with it than we would with videos or reading.
However, it is worse for languages like English than it is for more phonetic, regular languages like Romanian.  Not that it performs perfectly with Romanian, far from it.  Romanian has more agreements to worry about, and places where AI can make mistakes there.
 
The more I see AI used, the more I know it will not replace humans.  AI can help people with disabilities or few resources, but it is no replacement for a human.  Companies and schools that rely on AI will fail.  It is like going around in a wheelchair when you are capable of running, it just makes the brain weak.

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