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by hnfong 968 days ago
As it currently stands, ChatGPT is quite bad at classical Chinese.
1 comments

I think it is great for things that have lots of translations like the Tao Te Ching.

道生一,一生二,二生三,三生万物。万物负阴而抱阳,冲气以为和。

Try it with plus. Ctexts is a great source for classical Chinese texts: https://ctext.org/

No, I mean, I'm native in Chinese and reasonably literate in classical Chinese, and my assessment is that ChatGPT's understanding and generation of classical Chinese leaves much to be desired.

As an aside, if your reading of the Tao Te Ching does not include possibility of transcription errors, borrowed homophones (words with same sounds at the time of writing), etc. you're probably not exploring the full extent of the intended meanings of the original author(s). ChatGPT does none of that.

It's possible that ChatGPT's training data includes a couple translations of Tao Te Ching, in which case I'm not sure whether that better or worse in terms of results.

ctext.org is great though, no question about that. I've been using it for decades..