Ok, Lemmy, let’s play a game!
Post how many languages in which you can count to ten, including your native language. If you like, provide which languages. I’m going to make a guess; after you’ve replied, come back and open the spoiler. If I’m right: upvote; if I’m wrong: downvote!
My guess, and my answer...
My guess is that it’s more than the number of languages you speak, read, and/or write.
Do you feel cheated because I didn’t pick a number? Vote how you want to, or don’t vote! I’m just interested in the count.
I can count to ten in five languages, but I only speak two. I can read a third, and I once was able to converse in a fourth, but have long since lost that skill. I know only some pick-up/borrow words from the 5th, including counting to 10.
- My native language is English
- I lived in Germany for a couple of years; because I never took classes, I can’t write in German, but I spoke fluently by the time I left.
- I studied French in college for three years; I can read French, but I’ve yet to meet a French person who can understand what I’m trying to say, and I have a hard time comprehending it.
- I taught myself Esperanto a couple of decades ago, and used to hang out in Esperanto chat rooms. I haven’t kept up.
- I can count to ten in Japanese because I took Aikido classes for a decade or so, and my instructor counted out loud in Japanese, and the various movements are numbered.
I can almost count to ten in Spanish, because I grew up in mid-California and there was a lot of Spanish thrown around. But French interferes, and I start in Spanish and find myself switching to French in the middle, so I’m not sure I could really do it.
Bonus question: do you ever do your counting in a non-native language, just to make it more interesting?
If you didn’t cheat that’s actually pretty impressive.
It is astonishingly easy to get basically any LLM to output a simple iteration from one to ten function in all of those languages, and more.
Here’s Assembly:
Here’s FORTRAN
program iterate_from_one_to_ten implicit none integer :: i ! Loop from 1 to 10 do i = 1, 10 print *, i end do end program iterate_from_one_to_ten
Here’s COBOL
This doesn’t print 1-10, it prints 1-9 then
:
.Why does that assembly code use a global variable for a loop value?? It’s also ignoring register conventions (some registers need to be preserved before being modified by a function) which would probably break any codebase you use this in
Because it was generated by an LLM that assumes this one to ten iteration function is the entirety of all of what the code needs to do.