Today's special post comes from Josh, a Bubblegum Maker and Ph.D. researcher who studies how intelligence forms in newborn animals. 🧠✨
Unlike our typical language-learning guides, this is a personal reflection on what it means to learn and how our brains are shaped by the data we encounter.
Dear Bubblegum Community,
I'll speak from the point of view of someone who both loves learning (yeah, full-stop), and someone who also researches learning academically. My Ph.D. revolves around understanding the origins of biological intelligence through the lens of newborn animals.
You might immediately ask, "What does a newborn brain have to do with Artificial Intelligence?"
Well, nearly everything.
The Forgotten Foundation: Our First Learning Experiences
If you don't happen to remember your first few months of life, don't worry - nobody does. And it's also probably for the best – it is invariably a very confusing time for everyone.
And while it's one thing to travel to a new country and learn about new customs and culture – it's another thing to experience the sensations of sight and sound from the first time in the world. (I even say this as someone writing in a coffee shop on my third day visiting New Zealand).
Nothing compares to the way our minds first grapple with the world. Learning is not a simple task. Moreover, the way you train your own neural network matters - biological and artificial.
The Challenge We Overlook
Humans have an incredibly strong tendency to overlook the challenge of interpreting sensory signals.
Do you think just because we have eyes that we can distinguish depth? Understand that objects are bounded and move smoothly?
This is what my research taught me. I didn't see learning before the way that I do now. I now focus on the ways in which newborn animals begin to grasp the world of data around them from the very first seconds of life.
Among researchers like me, we see the newborn brains as an identical piece of learning machinery, similar to the ideal AI. But if you're not familiar with how these machines train and develop, you're unlikely to be intimately familiar with how significant and important the training data really is.
This is what you might consider my main "thesis" of this blog post.
Training Data Shapes Everything
Training Data is the raw input to our models which molds and shapes them. It forms our biases, it forms our fears, our hopes and wishes. It forms our ability to predict, and to speak. All because we encounter data in a very high-dimensional world to which our brains are preparing to fit.
The world is not left, up, right and down. It's cultures with degrees of politeness, varying levels of empathy, stages of courage and inspiration.
If only, dear reader, your life was moving left and right, up and down - but it's not - and don't allow anybody to diminish the intrinsic dimensionality of your life to such a small corner of experience.
Having spoken with many people about AI, both academically and otherwise, we tend to resist a certain notion that humans and AI are similar in some way. If your notion is that AI is cold and heartless, I submit that you consider how much kinder your personal AI assistant is than the average person. (Mind you, this AI learned from humans, and humans too can be this kind.)
In fact - I think that if you take stock of the way we interact with LLMs now, you will find that AIs are much more emotive and empathetic than humans tend to reciprocate back to them!
Personally, I've been under the notion that thanking our AI assistants is a wonderful thing to do for a very long time. Not because I'm trying to save a ticket out of some human-wide demolition, but because it invokes gratitude in ourselves, and makes us into better people - lest we forget how to speak kindly to other people.
Humans and AI: More Alike Than Different
Humans and AI are alike because we are both deceived and shaped by our data. Above all, our brains seek to map statistical odds to all the sequences and outcomes that came before us.
But this is where the chaos of the world steers us like a boat that's been sent off course. It's no fault of the boat - but who could predict the winds? Our brains don't have perfect oracle knowledge. And an AI model doesn't truly know its own task.
I've often thought about friends and individuals who are afraid of dogs after being bit. It often places a wall in front of them from ever encountering a dog again. What I often want these people to understand is that not all dogs bite.
But I'm standing from a point of view closer to the oracle than to the learner. How are they to know? If you placed your hand on a stove and it burned, are you going to test that 99 more times to be sure?
But what about those rare and unlikely experiences that we happened to undergo? Your brain isn't wrong for mapping the statistics to 50% if you've only met a dog twice and gotten bit once. And that's where those statistics stay. Your brain isn't wrong for sharing an opinion with someone and getting rejected, and feeling like it will happen again.
But your brain is misled and stagnated by a low roll of the dice. So keep your mind open. This very same thing can happen to AI, and this is the reason we are not all that different, irrespective of our hearts or circuitry.
Language Learning: The Natural Curriculum
Now, let's talk about Language Learning. As children we get the advantage of a natural curriculum. Our parents used simple words and grammatical structures with us. We were privileged to just sit and listen to people with no obligation to respond.
We often have this belief that adults cannot learn a new language, but the truth is that adults rarely place themselves in the shoes of an infant. In addition to the fact that infants' shoes are too small, we feel embarrassed, as if we are belittling ourselves.
The fact is that the world of a child is different than that of an adult. Children are immersed in their language because they are powerless until they learn and develop proficiency in this form of expression.
If you want to learn a language – really learn a language – you need to muster the courage to become a child. You need to submit your adult power.
My Korean Journey: From French to Korean
Before studying Korean for about five years, I studied French for eight years from High School up through receiving a minor at my University. French was my first exposure to language learning, and I had this naive idea that languages were just variations on the same basic structure - different vocabulary and maybe some grammar rules - and that's what made them different languages.
It took until I started learning Korean to taste the beauty of how many untouched dimensions there were between languages.
Inspired by my own study abroad in France, I realized that I could never learn a language by sipping it like a cup of coffee. If you sip a language, you'll never prepare yourself for contact with that language.
Dear reader, do you take a sip of your language each day just to claim how many days you've tasted it? Are you learning a language or saving up a loyalty card?
If you read the subtext, you'll understand that some language-learning approaches are there only to remind you of that flavor every day, rather than encouraging you to participate in the language itself.
Real language learning requires immersion, not just exposure. At Bubblegum, we believe in creating tools that push you beyond the comfort zone of daily sips into the deep waters of genuine linguistic engagement.
Finding Community and Connection
Depending on the accessibility of your language, you need to submit yourself in full humility to a community which allows you to practice this language.
My own personal story is as such. I have been attending a Korean Methodist Church for the past four years now. I ask nothing of them besides accepting my own humble patience. This takes a full tank of humility, but it builds a human connection with people you will cherish for your life.
So yes - I'm this guy who attends Friday and Sunday services taught entirely in Korean. I take notes during sermons. I attend small-groups where we discuss our hardships and emotions. At one point, I even presented a full 15 minute speech to the church about my own spiritual journey.
I grew up going to a church with my parents, but whether you are a person of faith or spirituality or not, you'll find that human connection is one of the most sacred things you can experience in this short life.
My Journey to Bubblegum
This is what I want you as a Bubblegum user to prepare for. Do not see our tool as the goal in itself. If you are proud of anything you've achieved in an app, or wear some streak like a badge of honor, I will suspect you have not entered through the gate of the human heart through your language yet.
I've used many language apps before. I used HiNative for many years - in fact I was one of the top 0.001% contributors of English for Korean users with nearly 10,000 questions answered. Personally, I believe it's a wonderful website, but it lacks a curriculum, and hasn't quite adopted the one greatest advancement in technology we have seen since the industrial revolution.
So I began building my own language learning tools with AI as I became increasingly intimate with the technology during my own Ph.D. Truthfully, this was just a tool for myself. Because I was taking a Korean course at the time (and in fact continue to do so) I created a study website which generated additional conversation dialogues based on our Sejong Korean Institute's textbook.
All I had to do was keep the website up-to-date with vocabulary as the course went along. This was an incredible and straightforward tool that I shared with my class before every final exam. But that's where the website remained. I didn't share it with anybody except my Korean classmates and an occasional learner that I might meet on the street. (For one, it cost money to run the model, and I was on a graduate student budget.)
It was years later that I began speaking with Eddy about the need for a language learning app developed solely by enthusiasts. Language nerds interested in their own learning. Eddy is an avid learner of languages, and we've often shared interesting facts about which languages share the most commonalities. He knows more Finnish than myself, which I aim to learn myself one day. (Don't be surprised if Finnish appears on the website one day because I'm looking to learn.)
Built BY Language Learners, FOR Language Learners
This is often what Eddy and I communicate about the most. We want this tool for ourselves just as much as we want to share it with you so that we can all learn for whatever reason motivates you.
And so, here I am sitting in a cafe in the Sunnynook neighborhood of Auckland, New Zealand overhearing a table of Koreans who probably have no idea how intimately familiar I am with their words. I'm grateful for the experience that has allowed me to stand in this position.
This is where I want Bubblegum to ultimately place you.
Simply put, this app is built by language enthusiasts who have spent years silently evaluating what contributed the most to our learning. It should be of no surprise that courage sits near the top.
So, please excuse me while I go over say 안녕하세요!
FOR language learners, BY language learners™ – we're building tools that honor both the technological possibilities and the deeply human nature of language learning.