I do believe parentage changes "the difficulty level" of life. Some kids are born to loving, nurturing, well-off parents and essentially "play the game of life" on level easy. Some kids play on level hard. However, it's the kid's own choice how they will play it.
I recently watched Steven Spielberg's recent autobiographical movie "The Fablemans". He portrayed there his own childhood and teenage years.
What I found most interesting is the fact that Spielberg's father was apparently a skilled computer engineer who worked for the IBM. There was a scene in the movie where Spielberg's father tries to show his kids the beauty of engineering while building some simple structure from wooden sticks but they all are disinterested and shortly run away. There is a scene where Spielberg's father tells teenage Spielberg that it would be better if he ditched this filmmaking hobby and started doing something more meaningful with his life.
Steven Spielberg did turn out to be exceptional but in a completely different way from his father.
You are generally correct but the context is crucial here - in this particular case it was my intention to get a verbose fancy sentence out of a much simpler one. ChatGPT inferred my wish from the previous prompts in that chat.
Such use of ChatGPT has been useful to me as I'm trying to progress from intermediate to advanced level in my knowledge of German. However, there are numerous methods for learning foreign languages and it is understandable that you may prefer your own ways and disagree with mine.
Yes, you can tell it that you are learning the language at the beginning of the conversation in plain English and ask it to correct any mistakes. You can easily start a bilingual conversation with ChatGPT, some random example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/112xgp2/practicing...
To show you what I meant when I mentioned "enriching sentences", I've just generated an example of a B1-level English sentence improved by ChatGPT.
User: Please improve this sentence: "Many people want to learn languages because they like to travel"
ChatGPT: "Learning languages is a popular pursuit because it enables people to travel and explore different cultures with greater ease."
It works similarly with other languages.
As for my German level, it wasn't evaluated by ChatGPT but by an external assessment exam and I only mentioned it to add some more context to the story. Frankly, I probably wouldn't trust ChatGPT's assessment in this regard.
I've been successfully using ChatGPT for learning German in the last month or so. It does a great job enriching my plain B1 level sentences with some fancy verbs or adjectives and pointing out my mistakes.
This analogy is a huge hyperbole and the sole number of people addressing that suggests that many people might consider it to be misinformation that should be corrected before it spreads.
Even if you meant authoritarian approach towards citizen in general (not regarding parenting), this is also incorrect. People who stayed out of politics weren't really persecuted here in Poland. Activists, independent journalists and priests were persecuted by the police but ordinary people just went on with their lives (although it is true that the regime used to be very oppresive in the 1940s-50s before Stalin died in 1956).
Funnily enough, I'm from the Eastern bloc (Poland) and apparently my grandma used to run a grocery store for some time in the 1980's. It could have been technically government owned, I never inquired. Whatever was the legal status, it was called "Grandma's store" in my family.
I grew up in the former Eastern bloc (Poland) in a small town and we had this sort of free-range parenting there. When I was around 9 or 10 I would spend my whole days playing outside with the other kids from the neighborhood, especially in the summer. Sort of like the "Bullerbyn children" in Astrid Lindgren's book. Sometimes one of us was sent on an errand (like to a local shop) and others went along to keep company. There were 5 of us hanging out regularly and most of us lived in two working parent households except one who had a SAH mother and another who was raised by a working single mother. So I don't think the lack of SAH moms is a factor here. Also, my parents are not religious and there definitely was no faith-based community. My parents actually didn't know that well the parents of other kids, we kids just met each other somehow in the area or were introduced by other kids that we knew. I think it was rather a combination of living in a safe neighborhood - suburb with low traffic (even now Poland has less cars per capita than US https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle...) and people being just less paranoid back then. Also, the societal expectations towards children have shifted in the recent years, now people often try to micromanage their children's time and provide them with too many after-school activities so kids don't have time to just hang around.
I do believe parentage changes "the difficulty level" of life. Some kids are born to loving, nurturing, well-off parents and essentially "play the game of life" on level easy. Some kids play on level hard. However, it's the kid's own choice how they will play it.