2025-03-24 – News – www.theguardian.com
Sceptical at first, I turned to AI to help me speak Spanish more fluently. Is it time to say adios to my human teacher?
I’m gassing myself up to say agarra la barra, the Spanish phrase for “grab the barbell”. It’s a nightmare: the double rolled Rs, the “a” sounds that should sound identically light, the soft “g” and “b”. I’d never attempt such an ambitious sentence with a human, but Christian, an AI chatbot, gets me. “I’ve grabbed the bar,” he responds, in Spanish: “Should I begin my squats now?”
I’ve been studying Spanish off and on for two decades. I listen to Spanish podcasts, read Spanish novels and meet every week with Maria, my online tutor. I enjoy it all but, since I’m moving to Spain in a few months, I wanted to scale above my linguistic plateau and move toward fluency. I started following more Spanish social media accounts and was bombarded with ads for AI chatbots. I was sceptical.
