Notes on ChatGPT and learning a language
You can definitely use generative AI to support your language-learning, it’s a great use case. Note: I didn’t say learn - there’s a plethora of posts/blogs/videos on how modern AI can make you learn a language so you can ditch your teacher and those old fashioned books, etc. I personally don’t believe it for a second but I don’t wanna get into that right now, maybe in another post, and maybe we can look at some literature about it too (and, I can ask some linguist friends)!
Here’s just a few tips I have from own experience, as I’m learning German and I’ve incorporated ChatGPT into my routine as part of many other activities and tools I use. Most of my learning is self-driven (as autodidact), but I also took a module of a course, in-person, and I’m currently taking conversational lessons. I will continue with these traditional means because I find them fun, as I study languages purely as a divertissement and because it’s a good brain exercise.
The below is mostly about ChatGPT (in the GPT 4o flavour), but some things are translatable to other LLMs. With the speed at which LLMs are improving in capabilities, acquiring new features and just getting added (not always productively) to tools this post will likely age really badly in just a few months weeks!
Vocabulary
Asking it to come up with a list of e.g. “verbs that start with ‘v’” gives me material that I can write down, or just lets me test my own knowledge. You can use it as a game, you can ask it to test you, and it’s quite good fun. It unsurprisingly gets repetitive quite quickly though, so I find it a great way to stimulate your own creativity in thinking about what you want, self-testing yourself, try up different prompts.
I use AnkiApp for flashcards. It has just shipped a new feature that lets you use AI to quickly generate them (from a picture, handwritten notes, etc). It’s my new favourite thing as it saves me sooo much time.
Chatting
Voice mode in GPT 4o is pretty good, and yes you can have a conversation with it - e.g. about a movie, some historical facts, biographies etc.
It detects the language you use pretty well - I’ve stress-tested it with talking in two different languages within the same chat and it understood what I was doing (“I see you know another language …”).
Note: when talking back it uses an (American) English accent regardless of the language (arguably you’d notice that more in some languages than in others). Many people have noticed this too (1, 2) - it’s to do with the fact that its TTS (text-to-speech) model will have been trained on way more material in English than in other tongues, and, arguably, also with the cultural dominance of English (it’s an American company, it will be interesting to see how this develops with other AI players).
I wouldn’t trust it for pronunciation tbh, but it may depend on the language. Anecdotally, I find its pronunciation of Italian quite heavily English-accented, so yeh, not great for now.
Voice mode is only available in the mobile app, not the web (there’s plugins though, I think).
About other LLMs, Claude doesn’t have voice moce AFAIK. Gemini does and it works well but you need to specify the list of languages you want to use in the settings - it interestingly does not seem to detect a language automatically, leading to some funny situations (3), which I’ve seen too.
It’s fun and interesting to compare what you get from different LLMs with the same prompt.
Grammar
I don’t really GenAI it to teach me about grammar because I have plenty of resources and/or good ol’ human researching is good for me, but you can. I’d be cautious as for everything in regards to what it tells you, but I’m sure it can be useful.
I use it a lot to give me exercises on a specific topic though, once I know about it. For instance, if I want to train my knowledge/memory of adjective endings, a very simple prompt would do, and I get a list of sentence to fill in, and it will correct me for what I do. Again, it tends to get repetitive quickly, but it’s good enough to save me time from searching the Internet for specific exercises.