There are some pretty neat devices that are similar to audio recording devices that you can speak into and it will speak the translation for you. A friend of mine got one for a trip to Japan and apparently it worked pretty well!

I've seen ChatGPT's English output, and I'd really prefer to not sound like it in other languages.

Because some people actually talk to other people in person?

So why can't you use high quality translation tech for that purpose?

If you don't understand the language it's translating into, how do you tell if the result is "high-quality" or not? ChatGPT will merrily hallucinate plausible nonsense pretty frequently...

ChatGPT can be confidently and subtly wrong about many subjects. It is most useful when you can verify its answers with low overhead. A language that I am still learning is one of the things for which I am _least_ equipped to do that.

Given how terrible it is at solving crossword clues, or even answering simple questions like how long words are or "what's the 7th letter of the word 'eyebrow'" (apparently it's "b", and "eyebrow" is 8 letters long), I'm not convinced it's competition with many things language-related just yet...