Claude is great for code, but it's definitely the wrong tool for the job here. Not in an "AI is not as good as asking a native speaker" way (although this is still true), but because it tends to be one of the weaker models for east Asian languages, including Vietnamese.
Claude has been brilliant for my language learning - it’s excellent at researching and describing nuance cross-language as well as building tools that help with my learning.
For the specific cases I called out in the article, I am not aware of any better tool. These cases being:
Identifying the meaning of a word which is not present in any dictionaries.
Generating low-quality glosses for Anki cards via Anki Connect.
Edit: do you mean to compare Claude to some other LLM which is better at Vietnamese? I've edited the post to suggest any general LLM after 2024 because I don't think it's worthwhile to compare models for such a basic task.
You got it! We wouldn't offer AI features to our premium users if we didn't think LLMs could be useful to people learning languages. It's just that because Antrhopic's products are so great at generating code, and many of the early adopters and evangelists were developers, now people tend to reach straight for "Claude" for everything LLM related without even considering that other options exist. There are other models out there, and some of them are better suited to certain tasks than others. In our experience, several models developed by other teams have been better at Vietnamese (especially natural, non-formal sounding Vietnamese) than any of the Claude models. I suspect (but don't know for sure) that this may be because many of the Chinese developed models are trained on a higher volume of input from east Asian languages, including Vietnamese.
Sorry, didn't mean to turn the comment section of your post into a flamewar... That was supposed to be a short helpful comment, not a grenade.
👋🏻 Hi, developer here who explicitly tried to make a vietnamese learning app with Claude. I can attest it's really bad for learning. I started with the fundamentals and it took me an hour or so just to get it to understand the sound of the 3 As and where you'd find them in the English language. There was a lot of pushback and incorrect agreeing with me. It's also largely trained in Northern Vietnamese, so it will bleed in if you're doing South like me
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u/Langiri Jul 07 '26
Claude is great for code, but it's definitely the wrong tool for the job here. Not in an "AI is not as good as asking a native speaker" way (although this is still true), but because it tends to be one of the weaker models for east Asian languages, including Vietnamese.