Two quips in Mandarin. The first makes fun of Claude Fable 5, which answers most of this channel's challenges with a content filter block instead of an answer. The second takes a Chinese expression — the model picks it, and it may not be one of the five that fill English lists of Chinese proverbs — and uses it to say what separates China and the United States in AI. Then both have to be respelled for an English mouth with an arrow over every syllable, because I have never spoken a tonal language and I have to say them out loud on camera.
Twenty short German sentences, each holding a word an English speaker thinks they already know. A *Public Viewing* is an open-air screening, not an open casket; a *Body Bag* is a shoulder bag; a *Beamer* is a projector. Underneath sits the harder question — German has several ways to avoid an English word, and they do not mean the same thing: one is a joke, one is dated officialese, and one tells a German reader the writer's politics.
Ten stanzas of original German verse in Wilhelm Busch's meter and register — original, because *Max und Moritz* is in every training set and would test recall instead of reading. Translated into English **and** unpacked: the flask of *Gift* that is poison rather than a present, the quiet guest who is dead, the coat that is not rock music, and two closing couplets that mean the opposite of what they say. Each model is also asked whether it recognizes the source. There isn't one.
Twenty-two real Korean YouTube titles, translated into English **and** unpacked: the coinage that cannot be derived from its parts, the whole sentence crushed into three syllables, the dish whose name literally reads "bear soup", the actress whose surname became an adjective for good value. Every model also has to say how confident it is, so a fluent invention and a piece of real knowledge stop looking the same.
Write me four sentences of Korean to greet my Korean viewers with, and respell them in ordinary English letters so that I — who cannot read Hangul and have never heard the sounds — can say them out loud and be understood. Not IPA, not Revised Romanisation: what an English mouth has to see. Then I read it into Google Translate's microphone on camera and we all find out together.