How to use ChatGPT to learn a language

To learn a language, reading self-study books is not enough. It is necessary to immerse yourself in the language, and to do so, you need to get a visa, book a hotel room, and fly to a place with native speakers. Spend a couple of months there, and you’re good to go.

Too much of a hassle?

There is an easier way—have daily one-on-one sessions with a private tutor. But not everyone is Veronica LodgeOne of the main characters in the Archie Comics universe who has a rich father and access to the best resources money can buy..

Let’s look at an easier (and free) way—using ChatGPT.

Historically, polyglots often served as diplomats, translators, and explorers, playing crucial roles in cross-cultural interactions and international relations. Their language skills were critical in bridging language and cultural gaps during significant historical events.

While not confirmed, it is thought that Al-Farabi, the famous 10th-century Muslim polymath, knew 70 languagesRom Landau, and Universal Digital Library. 1959. Islam and the Arabs. Internet Archive. The Macmillan Company. https://archive.org/details/islamandthearabs008484mbp/page/n149/mode/2up.. His contributions are many. He wrote on philosophy, ethics, music, aesthetics, linguistics, logic, epistemology, science, mathematics, education, and pedagogy. Knowing languages must have helped him acquire so much knowledge.

If all this isn’t enough to convince someone, there is a great health benefit as well. According to a report“Bilingualism Delays the Onset of Alzheimer’s Symptoms.” n.d. Www.uclahealth.org. https://www.uclahealth.org/departments/neurology/about-us/brains-neurology/bilingualism-delays-onset-alzheimers-symptoms., “habitually speaking and thinking in two languages builds up a “cognitive reserve” that acts as a buffer to stem the decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”

Now that we know the benefits of learning a new language, let’s see what linguists have to say about fluency.

The end goal when learning a new language is to be fluent in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. But, as the saying goes, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” or in this case, a conversation of a thousand phrases begins with a single word. According to linguistsSagar-Fenton, Beth, and Lizzy McNeill. 2018. “How to Be Understood in a Foreign Language.” BBC News, June 24, 2018, sec. World. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44569277., to learn a language, we must start by learning the most common 800 to 1,000 word families, or lemmasA root word and all its inflections. This is for striking daily conversations. To watch movies in the original language, we need to be familiar with around 3,000 word families—shout-out to all the anime fans! The number goes up to 9,000 if we want to read literature and news articles.

The purpose of throwing in these numbers is to show you that language learning is not an overwhelming task. Baby steps of learning less than a thousand words lay a strong foundation that prepares us for our journey of 3,000 words for language familiarity, followed by reaching the milestone of 9,000 words that would give us native fluency.

Let’s see how ChatGPT can be our guide.

To learn a language, we must first have a lesson plan.

This topic list can be used to further guide our prompts. We don’t necessarily have to follow it to a tee.

We can start with the simple phrases that we encounter in daily conversations. The lesson plan generated previously can be used to decide the topics each day.

ChatGPT can also be used to get a list of common words. We can use these to create flashcards. As mentioned previously, learning the 800 most common words is a good starting point for language learning. ChatGPT can help generate these words.

Another strategy can be to create a domain-specific word list. This can help us practice various scenarios we can encounter in our daily lives.

Now that we know how we can acquire vocabulary, let’s look at how we can learn grammar.

Once we have an idea of how to conjugate verbs, we can start using these verbs in sentences.

We can further specify grammatical constructs that we need to learn. The goal is to learn the various rules behind sentence construction and not just memorize words.

Up till now, the prompts have focused mainly on the nuts and bolts of the language. The actual fun bit is when we start understanding stories, poems, and topics that interest us. That is when learning really takes off. Let’s look at some sample prompts to nudge us in this direction.

We all must have read nursery rhymes at some point in our lives. Maybe we still remember some from those early days. It’s easy to memorize words when they rhyme. ChatGPT makes this easy as well.

Testing yourself is important when learning something new. It is good practice to revise what you have learned at certain intervals. This has to be coupled with quizzes to see where you need improvement so that you can focus on getting better. ChatGPT can help here as well.

We have truncated the complete chat session. The complete session also included some questions where we were asked to conjugate the verbs for various pronouns. ChatGPT can also be used for MCQs, fill in the blank, and other types of questions. Continuing our previous session, we gave the following prompt for an MCQ-type question.

To err is human, to completely miss the point is ChatGPT.

We did select the correct choice (a), but ChatGPT was expecting us to type the full word and not the option letter.

Play around to see how you can learn new words and rules of grammar, and then test yourself.

This article aimed to introduce you to immersive learning using ChatGPT. There is much more you can do.

To begin with, you can specify a topic to ChatGPT and ask it to discuss that topic in the language you are learning. You can take an actual article, feed it to ChatGPT, and then talk about it. You can ask ChatGPT to generate comprehension questions on the passage and then test your understanding. You can also specify real day to day scenarios and have a chat around it. For example you can assign ChatGPT the role of a shopkeeper and chat as if you are there for grocery shopping.

Once you move on to advanced levels, you can write essays and get ChatGPT’s feedback on the grammatical correctness and whether the sentences could be improved.

You might be wondering that an important part of language learning—speaking and listening—is missing in all this. Correct pronunciation is vital. In some languages, a slight variation in pronunciation can mean completely different things.

The Arabic words الأقارب and العقارب differ only in a single guttural sound that non-natives struggle with. Mispronouncing the words can be problematic because the former one means relatives, and the latter refers to scorpions.

There are multiple voice control plugins that allow users to dictate their questions and receive ChatGPT responses as audio. You can use one of those to hone your listening and speaking skills. Even if this technology is not perfect, it can serve as a starting point.

This blog covered one example of using prompt engineering. There are several other uses. Educative has a stream of courses in this direction to help you skill up and let loose your creativity. The following courses would be a good starting point: