And we’re back to learning chatGPT, and this time I’m going to show you how to learn a language using it. I will certainly make more videos about this, but if you’re totally new to learning a language, this is the way you can use chatGPT. I’m going to use the free version, so you can do that without paying anything. Just set up an account. Let’s say we want to learn French. Give chatGPT a general idea of what you want to do upfront, so that it knows in a specific chat what you’re up to. You usually get such lists; it helps you be consistent. Then use a prompt like this: act as an expert language teacher and design an overview for learning A1 level language skills, and then insert the specific language in a time frame. Let’s just say you want to learn French within a year, so let me design an overview outline for 12 months.
This is what you get. Now, the next step is to focus on a certain part of this outline that is focused on one, two, three, and create a detailed outline. We’re going to go deeper. Now we’ve got it outlined by a month, so one, two, and three. You get the idea, so I’ll stop it right here.
And now we’re going to focus on the first month and again set it to give you a detailed outline. This time we’ll split the first month into four weeks. And from then on, you tell chatGPT to create a detailed outline for the first week, so that you have a day-by-day practice plan. And this is the way to start. So you start with a general outline, and then you go deeper and even deeper until you have a specific daily practice plan.
Once you’ve done that, you’ve got the first part done, and you can progress to the extra stuff that you want to learn. So let’s, for example, focus on week one, day three. The objective is to introduce ourselves. And by the way, I’m going to paste all of these prompts in detail in the video description so you can copy-paste them. Offset it to Spanish as I’m currently learning that, so that means we play Spanish with French. And now we’re going to create a table, which is going to be our table for the day. So you can create such a table for every single day.
It has only given me five words to learn. Usually, I want to have 10 per day, at least when I learn Spanish. So let me tell it to make the table 10 words instead of just five. And I like to use the structure where you have the word, the translation, and then an example phrase, which is also translated. Once you’ve got that, you can take this information and use a flashcard system. I like to use Anki; it’s free. I’m going to link to it. It’s going to look like this, and you can copy these words, for example, ‘pair,’ which is ‘my name is,’ and I like to use the example phrases. So ‘Je m’appelle Sophie,’ my name is Sophie. I’m going to create a new deck; let me call that ‘French ChatGPT.’ And then I click on ‘Add’ up here, and now I can add the content of the table. So ‘My name is Sophie’ in the front, in the back, and then click on ‘Add’ right here.
Let me close this and get back to my deck in Anki. And now there’s a new card inside of this deck. So if I click on ‘Study Now,’ I see the front, which is ‘My name is Sophie,’ and then I can show the answer, and I can decide that was easy, so it’s going to be repeated in four days from now. And this is how you do it. As I said, I like to use 10 of these words per day when I do it in Spanish.
Next up is a Chrome extension that I like to use. It’s called Talk Berry; it’s also free, and you can talk to chatGPT using it. And chatGPT also reads the content to you in specific languages, so there’s a dropdown. You can set it to French in this case, but keep in mind it only works for a Chrome browser, so you have to access chatGPT using it. I’m here on Firefox, so I’m not going to show you this, but I’m going to link to Talk Berry. Try it out; I think it’s very useful when it comes to learning languages, as it’s going to read this stuff without an accent and pretty fluently and naturally to you. And you can, for example, give it a prompt that says, ‘Read the second column of the table to me,’ so that you know how these words should be pronounced. Just set Talk Berry to French in this case, and then it’s going to be good.
Next up, you can create your own exercises using the same method. So we’re going to focus on week one, day three, and now we want to have an example dialog that uses these words. And that way, we’re going to learn the words in a natural scenario. A translation is already given below; you can prompt it if you don’t see it. Just tell it to give you the translation in English in this case, and you should get it.
Next up, you can create a fill-in-the-blanks exercise. So create another dialog, but this time with a fill-in-the-blanks exercise. And it’s going to force me to use the words in the table to fill in the blanks. Sometimes it also produces blanks in the translation; I don’t think that this is an issue. You get the general idea here. We can now fill in these word blanks, and you can always add more of these exercises. Let it create variations, so the possibilities here are endless.
And that way, you don’t need to buy these language learning books anymore; it’s all here in chatGPT for free. I’ve certainly wasted a lot of money buying such books. You can also tell it to create online quizzes using the words in our table. So once again, it was week one, day three, and now you’ve got these Q&A exercises. Another way to test your vocabulary learning, and the answer is already given. If you don’t see them, just prompt it, tell chatGPT to give you the answers for the quiz. In this case, answer one would be ‘My name is.’
Another book category that I’ve wasted a lot of money on was short story collections. For example, for A-level language learners, you don’t need that anymore. Just tell chatGPT to write a short story for an A1 level learner or A2, or whatever your level is, and you can be specific and tell it to use words in the table that we’ve created. So for week one, day three, and there you go, you’ve got your beginner short story in French.
It has already given you a translation. I don’t like to use this format as it’s about scrolling up and down. Instead, I like to use Google Translate; it’s also free. Just set it, in this case, to French and English, and then copy-paste the short story from chatGPT into the box, and you’ve got your translation right next to it. And that way, you can easily follow this short story.
And these are the basic tips for learning a language using chatGPT. I hope this video was helpful. Thank you for watching, and I’ll see you next time. Thank you.
