Language Lessons from Packaging (And A Little Help from ChatGPT)

October 6, 2024Leave a comment

If you love scouring the multilingual packaging of household products from discounter stores (a niche hobby, I must admit, even for us linguists), then there’s a fun way to automate it with LLMs like ChatGPT.

Take the back of this packet of crisps. To many, a useless piece of rubbish. To me (and some of you, I hope!), a treasure of language in use.

Greek text on a packet of crisps

Normally, I’d idly read through these, looking up any unfamiliar words in a dictionary. But, using an LLM app with an image facility like ChatGPT, you can automate that process. What’s more, you can request all sorts of additional info like dictionary forms, related words, and so on.

From Packaging to Vocab List

Take a snap of your packaging, and try this prompt for starters:

Create a vocabulary list from the key content words on the packaging label. For each word, list:

– its dictionary form

– a new, original sentence illustrating the word in use

– common related words

The results should be an instantly useful vocab list with added content for learning:

Vocabulary list from food packaging by ChatGPT

Vocabulary list compiled by ChatGPT from a food packaging label

I added a note-taking stage to round it off. It always helps me to write down what I’m learning, adding a kinaesthetic element to the visual (and aural, if you’ve had ChatGPT speak its notes out loud). Excuse the scrawl… (As long as your notes are readable by you, they’re just fine!)

Handwritten vocabulary notes derives from crisp packet packaging

Notes on a crisp packet…

It’s a fun workflow that really underscores the fact that there are free language lessons all around us.

Especially in the humblest, and often least glamorous, of places.

ChatGPT takes conversation to the next level with Advanced Voice Mode

ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode is Finally Here (For Most of Us!)

September 29, 2024September 29, 2024Leave a comment

Finally – and it has taken SO much longer to get it this side of the Pond – Advanced Voice Mode has popped up in my ChatGPT. And it’s a bit of a mind-blower to say the least.

Multilingually speaking, it’s a huge step up for the platform. For a start, its non-English accents are hugely improved – no longer French or German with an American twang. Furthermore, user language detection seems more reliable, too. Open it up, initiate a conversation in your target language, and it’s ready to go without further fiddling.

But it’s the flexibility and emotiveness of those voices which is the real game-changer. There’s real humanity in those voices, now, reminiscent of Hume’s emotionally aware AI voices. As well as emotion, there’s variation in timbre and speed. What that means for learners is that it’s now possible to get it to mimic slow, deliberate speech when you ask that language learning staple “can you repeat that more slowly, please?”. It makes for a much more adaptive digital conversation partner.

Likewise – and rather incredibly – it’s possible to simulate a whole range of regional accents. I asked for Austrian German, and believe me, it is UNCANNILY good. Granted, it did occasionally verge on parody, but as a general impression, it’s shocking how close it gets. It’s a great way to prepare for speaking your target language with real people, who use real, regionally marked speech.

Advanced Voice Mode, together with its recently added ability to remember details from past conversations (previously achievable only via a hack), is turning ChatGPT into a much cannier language learning assistant. It was certainly worth the wait. And for linguaphiles, it’ll be fascinating to see how it continues to develop as an intelligent conversationalist from here.

Mapping out conversational probabilities - it's much easier with flowcharts.

Vocabulary Flowcharts : Preparing for Probabilities with ChatGPT

September 22, 2024Leave a comment

The challenge in preparing for a speaking task in the wild is that you’re dealing with multiple permutations. You ask your carefully prepared question, and you get any one of a number of likely responses back. That, in turn, informs your next question or reply, and another one-of-many comebacks follows.

It’s probability roulette.

What if you could map all of these conversational pathways out, though? Flowcharts have long been the logician’s tool of choice for visualising processes that involve forking choices. Combined with generative AI’s penchant for assembling real-world language, we have a recipe for much more dynamic language prep resources than a traditional vocab list.

And, thanks to a ready-made flowchart plugin for ChatGPT – courtesy of the charting folks at Whimsical.com – it’s really easy to knock one together.

Vocabulary Flowcharts in Minutes

In your ChatGPT account, you’ll need to locate the Whimsical GPT. Then, it’s just a case of detailing the conversational scenario you want to map out. Here’s an example for ‘opening a bank account in Germany’:

Create a flowchart detailing different conversational choices and paths in German for the scenario “Opening a bank account as a non-resident of Germany planning to work there for six months.” Include pathways for any problems that might occur in the process. Ensure all the text reflects formal, conversational German.

The result should be a fairly detailed ‘probability map’ of conversational turns:

A ‘vocabulary flowchart’ in German, created by the Whimsical.com GPT on ChatGPT.

Vocabulary flowcharts are another tool in your AI arsenal for speaking prep. Have you given them a whirl yet? Tell us about your own prep in the comments!

Lots of colourful neon shortcuts on a screen.

Apple Shortcuts for Smart Study Hacks

September 15, 2024Leave a comment

I’ve been optimising my iPad for study recently, trying to make it a portable, one-stop shop for reading and prep on-the-move. It’s no doubt another flex of my childhood awe for Inspector Gadget’s niece Penny, and her computer-in-a-book that could do everything.

Anyway, it’s led me to discover lots of features I half knew about, but had ignored for the duration of my Apple fanboydom. And one of the biggest revelations of rediscovery has been the Apple Shortcuts app.

In a nutshell, Shortcuts allows you to bundle all sorts of custom process chains into a single, iconisable action. For example, a shortcut could retrieve something, do something with the result, then present it in a certain way. People use them for all sorts of admin tasks – collecting stock prices and collating them in a spreadsheet with a single click, for instance.

The cool thing is that many third-party apps have extensions that you can link into shortcuts. ChatGPT, for example, which I find invaluable as a quick summary or explanatory tool, can be part of an action chain. And you can trigger chains not just with clicks, but from documents, via the share link.

Shortcuts for Smart Study : Brief Description

Using the app, I put together a quick shortcut I called “Brief Description”. It sends the current PDF (from a browser window, or from the Files app), to ChatGPT, prompting it for a one-paragraph summary.

A screenshot from Apple Shortcuts of a ‘Brief Explanation’ action using ChatGPT.

As you can see, one of the best things about it is how you assemble a shortcut in more or less natural language, as you select items via an intuitive click-and-build interface. There are also plenty of resources for getting started and pushing the boundaries of it (like this very clued-up YouTube channel!).

The result of my shortcut offers a great way to get a paper summary, whatever the language:

Screenshot of an Apple Shortcuts link in the share menu.

When working through a bunch of resources, it’s great to ascertain in a click or two whether it might be a worthwhile full read, making this a brilliant time-saver. It’s even more powerful when combined with ChatGPT’s new(ish) memory features – my account ‘knows’ what I’ve been working on from recent chats, so is even better able to judge what’s useful.

For sure, I’ll be exploring more of this over the coming weeks, as it’s clear I’ve barely scratched the surface of how useful it could be yet. Have you used Apple Shortcuts to create smart study hacks? Let us know in the comments!

ElevenLabs Reader is the TTS robot you need!

ElevenLabs Reader : Enjoy it while it’s free!

September 8, 2024Leave a comment

I’ve raved before about the fantastic text-to-speech facility at ElevenLabs. Voices so realistic they pretty much pass for human, that work across languages, and can even clone your own.

Well, there’s a little-feted app that the ElevenLabs team are behind that is a similar show-stopper in its category. It’s simply called Reader, and is a free text-to-speech narration app for Android and iOS.

Like the company’s web-based TTS service, it has the same range of emotive, expressive, ultra-realistic voices. It can also cope well narrating many languages, which are autodetected. Best of all for me is that it links with your device’s documents, so I can quickly import the papers I’m reading. Listening AND reading has made a massive difference to my comprehension and recall – multimodal is definitely the way forward for me!

You do get the odd strange artefact in the readout, but the product is still in Beta (likely the reason it’s currently completely free), and glitches are rare. What I’m also missing in it is the ability to tweak imported texts in-app, as you can do with Speechify. This would allow some cleaning of the file pre-narration (I lost count of the number of times I had to skip the page footer DOI link, which it hilariously mis-narrated many times). You can, of course, simply export and clean the files as text before importing, which gets round that.

In any case, they’re worth putting up with while the app is still free and in Beta. Even as it is, you have features here that you’d pay a small fortune for in other apps (ahem, Speechify). Definitely worth a punt if you’re looking for TTS support in your reading! Find download links for Android and iOS here.

The cover of Scottish Gaelic - A Comprehensive Grammar (Routledge)

Scottish Gaelic : A Comprehensive Grammar Released This Week!

September 1, 2024Leave a comment

It’s a moment Gaelic learners and general language aficionados have been waiting a long time for. Routledge has finally added the language to its Comprehensive Grammar series!

Released this week, the new reference work by Edinburgh University’s Professor William Lamb fills a real gap on the Gaelic bookshelf. Learners looking for a modern guide have had a much narrower choice of much briefer handbooks, such as Michel Byrne’s excellent, but rather slim Gràmar na Gàidhlig. Either that, or explore the ambitious descriptive grammars of old, like Shaw’s 18th-Century Analysis of the Gaelic Language, which is fascinating, but not particularly contemporary (although you know I love an ancient language manual).

The new Routledge tome weighs in at a hefty 580 pages, and looks to be an exhaustive tour of the contemporary language. It’s also very reasonably priced at around the £30 mark (compare, for example, the price of the Swedish counterpart!). If you’re a student, then you can get an additional 25% off that by buying directly from Routledge via a student discount site like Student Beans.

Suas leis a’ Ghàidhlig!

A Cultural Exchange After The Vows

August 25, 2024August 25, 2024Leave a comment

As people fixated on all things language, we often assume that those outside our bubble are oblivious to the joy we get from dabbling, finding out about and having fun with words. But at a cross-cultural wedding this weekend, I was delighted as the topic of language came up, again and again – and people just ran with it.

The ceremony was between a Scottish-English friend and her Latvian partner, with a small group of celebrants on either side. The Latvian party spoke both Latvian and Russian amongst each other, all with very good English (of course!). The Brits were, encouragingly, a multilingual lot too, which is always good to see (our reputation preceding us all too often).

The touch-point was simple curiosity. It was time for the toasts and the meal, and someone piped up how do you say cheers in Latvian? That’ll be priekā! Soon on its heels followed how do you say bon appetit in Latvian? (Labu apetīti!) Before we knew it, we were deep in linguistic exchange. It wasn’t one-way, either; when it transpired that a waitress was a Doric Scots speaker, like one of our party, a whole other language lesson was delivered back to our Latvian friends. Fit, faa, foo…yes, they really are question words in Aberdeenshire!

The loveliest thing was that it didn’t stop at the initial tidbit of info. The newly shared Latvian and Doric phrases kept ringing out throughout the meal, practised by the guests in much the same way as kids show off a new skill. It was an absolute joy to witness – learning about each other through language, and using that knowledge to keep a new dialogue going. When the time to say goodbye arrived, I’d already Google Translated and memorised a snippet to part on, tipsily:

Bija jauki iepazīties (it was lovely to meet up)

Making connections like this and seeing them flourish refreshes our faith in humanity. When we explore and celebrate our diversity, we are truly at our best.

French Coffee Breaks

August 11, 2024Leave a comment

If you know me, you’ll know that French was long my ‘also ran’ language – solid but under-used and under-practised. But that’s been changing more and more in recent years, as the language has been unexpectedly useful for a whole range of reasons. So this week, here’s a wee heads-up from me about a book I’ve been finding super useful for brushing up my French: 50 French Coffee Breaks.

I’ve been aware of the Coffee Breaks Languages brand for a while, thanks to their series of podcasts. They’re not actually a resource I’d used much in the past, as I had the impression the level was a bit basic. Wrong false impressions – I was pepped up by their Swedish ‘holiday soap opera’ lately, which was far from beginners-only, and really helped prepare for a trip to Malmö.

Anyway, roll on to now, and me, searching for something to improve my French. I’m a repeat false beginner – I did French at school, but ditched it for German and Spanish early on. Since then, though, it’s become incredibly useful (and attractive) as the language of a wonderful country that is very close to my own, and so very easy to visit! Cue lots of ‘improve my French’ blitz sessions over the years.

French Coffee Breaks

For that French blitz, there are a couple of good, systematic improve-your-French books about, including the excellent Teach Yourself French Tutor, which I’ve used for grammar training. And it’s Teach Yourself that are behind the 50 Coffee Break books too, so there’s heritage and form backing the format.

The approach couldn’t be better for a busy linguist fitting in an extra maintenance language amidst everything else. The chapters offer 5, 10 and 15-minute practice sessions, across a range of useful (very travel-friendly) topics. In fact, they generally took me less time, depending on the level, but in every case they either strengthened something I’d half-forgotten, or taught me something new.

It’s definitely the kind of book you’ll want to write on and deface with a pen – anathema I know (books are my temple too!) but I made an exception with this one. There’s something very satisfying about filling it with scribble, and the pocket paperback format is perfect for it (I’d never sully my Teach Yourself Tutor books this way, mind!).

Overall, a fab purchase that has confirmed how useful the Coffee Break Languages materials are after all. I was thrilled to see that a Swedish version was released only last year too, something that had escaped my attention. Needless to say, I’ve got that one on my shelf now too…

Shelves of helpful robots - a bit like Poe, really!

Which LLM? Poe offers them all (and some!)

August 4, 2024Leave a comment

One of the most frequent questions when I’ve given AI training to language professionals is “which is your favourite platform?”. It’s a tricky one to answer, not least because we’re currently in the middle of the AI Wars – new, competing models are coming out all the time, and my personal choice of LLM changes with each new release.

That said, I’m a late and recent convert to Poe – an app that gives you them all in one place. The real clincher is the inclusion of brand new models, before they’re widely available elsewhere.

To illustrate just how handy it is, just a couple of weeks ago, Meta dropped Llama 3.1 – the first of their models to really challenge the frontrunners. However, unless you have a computer powerful enough to run it locally, or access to Meta AI (US-only right now), you’ll be waiting a while to try it.

Enter Poe. Within a couple of days, all flavours of Llama 3.1 were available. And the best thing? You can interact with most of them for nothing.

The Poe Currency

Poe works on a currency of Compute Points, which are used to pay for messages to the model. More powerful models guzzle through compute points at a higher rate, and models tend to become cheaper as they get older. Meta’s Llama-3.1-405B-T, for example, costs 335 points per message, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o-Mini comes in at a bargain 15 points for each request.

Users of Poe’s free tier get a pretty generous 3000 Compute Points every day. That’s enough credit to work quite extensively on some of the older models without much limitation at all. But it’s also enough to get some really useful (8-ish-requests daily) use from Llama 3.1. And, thanks to that, I can tell you – Llama 3.1 is great at creating language learning resources!

Saying that, with the right prompt, most of the higher-end models are, these days. Claude-3.5-Sonnet is another favourite – check out my interactive worksheet experiments with it here. And yes, Claude-3.5-Sonnet is available on Poe, at a cost of 200 points per message (and that’s already dropped from its initial cost some weeks back!). Even the image generation model Flux has made its way onto the platform, just days after the hype. And it’s a lot better with text-in-image (handy if you’re creating illustrated language materials).

Poe pulls together all sorts of cloud providers in a marketplace-style setup to offer the latest bots, and it’s a model that works. The latest and greatest will always burn through your stash of Computer Points faster, but there’s still no easier way to be amongst the first to try a new LLM!

Polyglossic

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