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A lot of languages require a lot more context to speak and understand than others. English is a very low-context language, at least in formal registers - it just gets very wordy and very specific, and it helps that it is very analytic and isolating, with a massive vocabulary.

But for e.g. Spanish, if a bare subjunctive verb (making the verb "<x>" something like "could <x>," "should <x>," or "would <x>" without specifying) is used in a sentence, there's no way to know from that sentence who or what that subjunctive is being applied to. The unwritten rule is: 1) if it's obvious who or what you've been talking about, then it applies to that person or thing, 2) if there are two or more things it could be about, then you should figure out a way to add more information to specify which, and finally 3) if there are no good candidates, the person is referring to themselves.

I've heard that there's a lot more of that in Japanese, a language that I don't think really has personal pronouns at all. For example, iirc when you refer to an emotional state and don't specify who you're talking about, it's automatically assumed that you're talking about yourself. I'm not too familiar with Japanese, but languages are simply different from each other, they're not substitution ciphers.

LLMs have trouble staying aware of the context as things go on even for a fairly short time, and in some languages, the meaning of the conversation infects every utterance. Seems a little similar to how LLMs are bad at lifetimes in Rust. I'm sure they'll gradually get better.



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