Category: Technology

A digital brain, complete with memory - ChatGPT take note!

Your ChatGPT Teacher – With Persistent Memory!

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The interactivity of AI models like ChatGPT and Bing make them the perfect medium for exchange-based language learning. But for one thing: their lack of persistent memory.

The standard setup, to now, has been for a ‘black box’ style conversation on AI platforms. You initiate a session with your instructions, you chat, and it’s over. You can revisit the conversation in your history, but as far as AI is concerned, it’s lost in the mists of time.

It’s something that throws a mini spanner in the works of using AI for language (or any kind of) learning. Teaching and learning are cumulative; human teachers keep records of what their students have studied, and build on previous progress.

DIY ChatGPT Memory

There seems to be little movement in the direction of AI with memory amongst the big platforms, although OpenAI’s recent announcement of memory storage for developer use might lead to third-party applications that ‘remember’. But in the meantime, users within the AI community, ever adept at finding workarounds and pushing the tech, have begun formulating their interim alternatives.

One clever way around it I recently spotted takes advantage of two elements of ChatGPT Plus: custom instructions and file upload/analysis. In a nutshell, an external text file serves as ChatGPT’s ‘memory’, storing summarised past conversations between student and AI teacher. We let ChatGPT know in the custom instructions that we’ll be uploading a history of our previous conversations at the beginning of a learning session. We also specify that it analyse this file in order to pick up where we left off. At the end of each session, we prompt it to add a round-up of the present conversation to that summary, and give the file back to us for safekeeping.

Custom Instructions

Here’s how I’ve worked the persistent memory trick into my own custom instructions:

If I upload a file ‘memory.txt’, this will be a summary of our previous conversations with you as my language teacher; you will use this to pick up where we left off and continue teaching me. When prompted by me at the end of our session, update the file with a summary of the present conversation and provide me with a link to download it for safekeeping. This summary should include a condensed glossary of any foreign language terms we’ve covered.

Wording it as such makes memory mode optional; ‘teacher remembering’ only kicks in if you upload memory.txt. This way, you can otherwise continue using regular, non-teach ChatGPT without any fuss.

The only thing that remains is to create a blank text file called memory.txt to start it all off. Remember to start a new chat before giving it a whirl too, so your new custom instructions take. As you use the technique in your everyday learning chats, you’ll see memory.txt blossom with summary detail. As an offline record of your learning, it even becomes a useful resource in its own right apart from ChatGPT.

Just make sure you keep it safe – that’s your teacher’s brain you have right there!

A page of conversation summaries - my ChatGPT 'memory' file in action.

My ChatGPT ‘memory’ file in action.

Let us know your experiences if you give this technique a go! And if you’re stuck for lesson ideas, why not check out my book, AI for Language Learners?

A deck of neon flashcards. Anki cards might not be quite as fancy!

From ChatGPT to Anki : Instant Potted Vocab Decks!

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With cutting edge AI galvanising the language learning world, traditional tools like Anki – which would have been considered the leading edge not that long ago – seem well in the shade. But it’s not a question of either-or. Traditional and new tech can work in happy symbiosis to support language learning.

Preparing for a recent high-stakes language mission (OK, island-hopping hol!) to Greece, I wanted to turboboost my Greek vocab. Anki was my tool of choice, of course, but one question remained: where to source new flashcard decks? Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Bing were easy choices for generating topical vocab lists, but how much copy-pasting would that involve? I wasn’t keen on spending hours formatting cards manually.

Thankfully, ChatGPT Plus’ Advanced Data Analysis mode can provide a bridge between old and new. Forget that slightly intimidating title – the main boon is simply that this mode can output a text file. And, given the right format, Anki can take such a text file as an import source. With a bit of prompting prowess, we can automate the whole process – from topic to cards, in one fell swoop. Before long, I had a fresh daily drip-drip of new words and phrases, a real shot in the arm for my Greek pre-trip.

Here’s how to task ChatGPT with the whole job of Anki deck creation. If you don’t have the Plus version, no problem – scroll down for a modified version that works with completely free plans and services!

Automatic Anki Decks – Plus Style

First of all, start a new chat in ChatGPT, and make sure Advanced Data Analysis is selected in the drop-down menu under ChatGPT-4.

Selecting Advanced Data Analysis mode in ChatGPT-4.

Selecting Advanced Data Analysis mode in ChatGPT-4.

Now, we’re ready for our prompt. Like our AI speaking prep worksheets, the beauty of this is just how specific you can make your flashcards. The topic can be as broad or narrow as you like. Here’s a sample prompt to create a French deck on the talking point ‘social issues’:

Hello! I’m learning French, and I’d like you to create an Anki flashcard deck to help me. To import a deck, Anki requires a CSV file format with just a “Front”, “Back” and “Tags” field corresponding to the English. the target language phrase and the part of speech. There is no need for header fields, so the first line should represent the first vocabulary item.
Can you create such an Anki-ready list of 50 flashcard items on the topic “Social Issues” for me, then save it for me as a .txt file I can import into the app?
– Provide a good mixture of essential and useful nouns, verbs, adjectives, and useful phrases / sentence frames (ie., so it’s not just a list of nouns!).
– Provide each term in its dictionary form if appropriate, indicating gender, plural and essential or irregular parts briefly as per convention where applicable.
– Ensure that all terms relate to the contemporary culture of the target language country as much as possible.
– Please draw on resources in the original target language when researching which words will be most useful, cross-referencing with all available data and checking constantly to make sure that the target language for the flashcards is accurate and colloquial, never bookish or unnatural.

Limitations (For Now)

One limitation with the Advanced Data Analysis mode is that it can’t run concurrently with ChatGPT’s now restored web-connected mode, or Browse with Bing. All that means is that it will be relying on its banks of training data for the vocab collation, rather than the web. But in most cases, it shouldn’t make too much difference given the vastness of that data (although it will notify you apologetically about it – see below). We’re waiting for the day – hopefully soon – that OpenAI allows users to run several premium features together.

ChatGPT Plus whirring away creating an Anki deck.

ChatGPT Plus whirring away at an Anki deck. Quirky repartee not as standard, but provided by special request thanks to custom instructions! I like my AI cheeky.

Into Anki We Go

One you have your ChatGPT-infused vocab file ready, you can import it straight into Anki. In the Anki desktop app, head to File > Import, and select the file you saved. The import settings window will pop up, including, crucially, which field matches to which column of your data under Field Mapping. The app guesses correctly for the most part, but occasionally you may need to specify that the third column (part of speech) maps to the tags field.

Importing CSV data into Anki decks.

Importing CSV data into Anki decks.

And that’s it. You should get a brief report of the number of items added, and they’re ready to play with straight away. Instant, fresh vocab decks in seconds!

No ChatGPT Plus? No problem!

Now, the above is all very well if you have ChatGPT Plus. Many platforms lack the file output side of things. But you can still get them do the heavy work of vocab-hunting and file-formatting; all you need to do is the final copy-paste-save.

Here’s how to alter the prompt for plain old vanilla ChatGPT and Bing, coaxing it to provide Anki-ready output. I’ve also made the format a little clearer, which might help if you’re using slightly older models like ChatGPT-3.5.

Hello! I’m learning French, and I’d like you to create an Anki flashcard deck to help me. To import a deck, Anki requires a CSV file format with just a “Front”, “Back” and “Tags” field corresponding to the English. the target language phrase and the part of speech.
Can you create such an Anki-ready list of 25 flashcard items on the topic “Driving a Car” for me? Output the CSV data as formatted as code so I can easily copy-paste into a text file for Anki.
– Don’t include header fields in the CSV – the first line of your output should be the first vocabulary item (ie., car,la voiture,noun).
– Provide a good mixture of essential and useful nouns, verbs, adjectives, and useful phrases / sentence frames (ie., so it’s not just a list of nouns!).
– Provide each term in its dictionary form if appropriate, indicating gender, plural and essential or irregular parts briefly as per convention where applicable.
– Ensure that all terms relate to the contemporary culture of the target language country as much as possible.
– Please draw on resources in the original target language when researching which words will be most useful, cross-referencing with all available data and checking constantly to make sure that the target language for the flashcards is accurate and colloquial, never bookish or unnatural.

Your platform should spool out some easily copiable code. Simply paste this into a text file, save, and import into Anki.

Even using 3.5, I got some great results featuring practical, useful vocabulary sets.

Creating Anki decks with the free ChatGPT3.5 model.

Creating Anki decks with the free ChatGPT3.5 model.

Experiment, Experiment, Experiment!

As with all AI prompts, it’s worth experimenting with everything to tweak, improve and get the absolute best out of it. The number of cards, the mix of words and phrases, the source of the material – make it your own. When you have it just right, you can create cards for your own, or your students’ learning, in seconds.

Oh, and don’t forget to save your perfect prompts somewhere you can copy-paste them from later, too!

If you’re keen for more artificial intelligence tips to boost your learning, please check out my book AI for Language Learners. It’s packed with practical examples to fuel your linguistic adventures!

A neon globe surrounded by books - the AI future is here.

AI for Language Teachers – the Essential Bookshelf

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Clearly, emerging Artificial Intelligence platforms have colossal potential to transform education. Indeed, they are already doing so, proving to innovative disruptors that teachers and students are still grappling to understand. Given the pace of change, where can educators find solid training on practical, classroom-ready AI techniques?

Thankfully, a raft of publications has sprung up with teaching practice at its core. Many of the best titles are from author-educators who have self-published from personal experience. Self-publishing, of course, is a quick, reactive way to get books out there, so it’s unsurprising that there are so many gems that don’t originate with big publishing houses.

It must be said that the majority of current titles are US-centric – again, unsurprising, given that largely US-based AI companies have generally release the leading-edge innovations in the US first. That said, the following picks are all notable for a universal approach, with a generality that should make them useful whatever the setting.

Without further ado, here is the language teacher’s essential AI bookshelf!

The Essential AI Bookshelf

THE AI CLASSROOM

Amazon product image - the AI Classroom The AI Classroom With five-star reviews almost across the board, the authors of The AI Classroom were quick off the mark; the book has become an early leader for practical teaching ideas utilising artificial intelligence. It contains a broad range of ready-to-use prompts, perhaps the most reliable hallmark of the best AI guides for teachers and learners on the market at the moment. What is particularly insightful is the discussion of school policy as an important consideration – an indispensable consideration, particularly for department heads and administrators.

THE AI INFUSED CLASSROOM

Amazon product image - The AI-Infused Classroom

The AI Infused Classroom by Holly Clark is a practical and visionary guide for educators who want to use emerging LLM tools to transform teaching and learning. Clark, a seasoned teacher and edtech expert, is author of The Infused Classroom series, which explores how to amplify student voices with technology. This book builds on those ideas, demonstrating how to leverage AI as a catalyst for innovation, creativity, and deep learning. The book adopts a refreshingly student-centred approach to classroom AI, and is a source of invaluable best practice for teachers of languages and otherwise.

AI FOR LEARNING

Amazon product image - AI for Learning Part of the AI for Everything series, AI for Learning is a book that explores how the medium can, and should, positively impact human learning in various contexts. The authors offer a clear and engaging introduction to the concepts, applications, and implications of AI for learning. The book serves as both an explanatory introduction and practical guide, covering topics from core concepts of AI to how it can develop critical thinking and digital citizenship skills, and prepare learners for the future of work and learning. The book also addresses the ethical and social issues that arise from using AI for learning, such as privacy, bias, accountability, and trust.

80 WAYS TO USE CHATGPT IN THE CLASSROOM

Amazon product image - 80 Ways to Use ChatGPT in the Classroom You can’t beat a good old ‘X ways to do…’ guidebook, and this volume boasts an impressive 80 of them! 80 Ways to Use ChatGPT in the classroom gets straight down to brass tacks with organised, practical prompt examples. A particular strength of this book is a welcome nod to balance throughout, with ample discussion of the issues as well as the well-fanfared benefits. As one of the earliest of these guides to appear, the focus is ChatGPT. However, as with all of these books, the knowledge is easily transferrable to other platforms.

AI FOR LANGUAGE LEARNERS

The cover of AI for Language Learners by Rich West-Soley As the only title to focus specifically on languages – and the one I penned myself – I could hardly leave out AI for Language Learners! Written to be accessible to individual learners as well as classroom teachers, it’s packed full of practical prompt ideas. These cover language reference, practice activities and resource creation. What’s more, the book includes access to a website with copy-paste prompt for those with the paperback. That is definitely a boon to those those typing fingers! The book was a labour of love over summer 2023, and is the product some very enthusiastic experimentation to support my own polyglot learning. I hope you have as much fun trying the prompts as I did writing them.

Brave New World

As AI comes to land firmly in classrooms over the coming months, we’ll undoubtedly be seeing title after title appear. Are there any favourite titles of yours that we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments!

AI for Language Learners by Rich West-Soley; ChatGPT, Bing and more for your languages study

AI for Language Learners – Book Now Available!

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It was a labour of love that happily took up most of my summer, and it’s finally out! I’m very chuffed to announce that my book AI for Language Learners is available on all Amazon stores.

 

The book is the product of months of tweaking, prodding and experimenting with emerging AI chat platforms. If you’re a Polyglossic regular, you’ll have seen some of those nascent techniques appear on the blog as I’ve developed and used them in my own learning. The blog has been a bedding ground for those first book ideas, and I’m thankful to everyone who has followed along with my own AI journey.

What we’ve come to call AI are, strictly speaking, actually large language models (LLMs). These LLMs arise from billions of words of training material – truly staggering amounts of data. The resulting super-text machines are perfect matches for subjects that benefit from a creative flair with words, and as language learners, wordplay is our currency. The book contains over 50 rich prompts for getting the absolute most out of AI’s impressive capacity for it.

The process has been huge fun. Of course, that’s thanks largely to the often unintentional humour our non-sentient friends ChatGPT, Bing and others. I try to get this across in the book, which has its fair share of lighthearted moments.

I hope you have as many smiles trying the recipes out as I did putting them together!

AI for Language Learners is available on Amazon Kindle (UK £2.99, US $2.99) or in paperback (UK £7.99, US $7.99). Even better: if you’re a Kindle Unlimited member, you can download and read it as part of your subscription.

An AI robot helper - just like the kind you can achieve for your language learning with ChatGPT's Custom Instructions.

Instant AI Language Learning : ChatGPT Custom Instructions

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If AI is already an important parcel of your language learning routine, you won’t want to miss this.

OpenAI have added a Custom Instructions feature to the ChatGPT platform. Custom Instructions is a place for you to add important details you always want to mention before your chat session starts.

In practical terms, it can contain all of the regular priming that you usually add manually at the beginning of a session, like “you are a language teacher“, “you will speak in simple French around level A1” and so on. Automating this means you can open up your ChatGPT console and have your language assistant ready to go from the start, saving heaps of time. In a sense, it adds what has been sorely missing from AI so far: persistent memory of its users.

Even better – the feature is available to both free and premium users of ChatGPT, so you can start using it straight away!

Where Is It?

On the web app, you’ll find the new custom instructions settings by clicking your profile link at the bottom-right of the screen. On the mobile app, you’ll find it in Settings.

ChatGPT's custom instructions setting. Add prompts to get your AI ready from the get-go.

ChatGPT’s custom instructions setting in the web app.

The Settings option in the ChatGPT mobile app.

Settings in the ChatGPT mobile app.

Priming Your AI Assistant

Once open, you have two fields – an about you, and a response style option. The about you section tells ChatGPT the kind of user you are. This can include academic interests, favourite learning styles, talents and have and challenges you face – anything that a good learning assistant should know. For example:

I study several languages and am an active member of the polyglot community. My current projects are Greek, Icelandic and Polish. Indo-European linguistics is especially interesting to me. I love seeing the different links between all the different languages I learn.  I am a visual learner and love lists and tables, but I have concentration issues with long blocks of dense text. Apart from languages, I love music and travel, and learning about the world. Environmental activism is another of my passions.

In the response style field, you tell ChatGPT what kind of assistant you want it to be. For instance:

You are my personal language learning assistant, so all responses should be in both the target language I specify for a given session, and English. Any non-English you use should be aimed at a learner of around A2 on the CEFR scale, simple and clear. You will correct any errors I make in the target language, and give associated grammatical details to help me learn from my mistakes. Where there is an interesting cultural link to the target language country, you will include it in your response. You will always be supporting and encouraging, and nurture my love in language learning.

Try these for size, and you’ll notice a not-unsubtle change in the way ChatGPT responds to you. It uses those custom fields to colour everything that it relays back to you. And they’re there every time you turn it on – until you’re ready to change your assistant’s personality! You’ve created a robot teacher who just gets you.

Custom instructions are a fantastic way to get ChatGPT straight into the role you want as soon as you turn it on. Have you used them yet? Let us know about your experiences in the comments!

The Verb Blitz Adage : Keep It Simple

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They say it’s best to keep things simple. And so it is with the Verb Blitz apps.

Verb Blitz, if you missed it, is a solid, old-school reference and drill tool to practise verb conjugations. I created the first over a decade a go as a nerdy hobby project in machine morphology, and it’s now available in 23 languages. Originally intended as a support for my own learning, it’s now helping lots of other learners grapple with endings, stem changes, and all other manner of verb fiendishness.

It was definitely high time for updates. The original apps were developed in XCode with Objective-C and storyboards, which are now very much ‘the old’. Since then, Swift and SwiftUI have become the smart new kids on the block for all things Apple. The longer you leave things, the harder it is to catch up, so a conversion project was as much about up-skilling myself as keeping the apps functional and easily updateable.

A screenshot of Verb Blitz for Scottish Gaelic.

Reining It In

The thing to guard against is that overzealous rush you get when you start a new project. It has a lot in common with the euphoric optimism polyglots get when they start a new language. After a handful of words, we’re promising ourselves that we’ll reach C1 within a year, that’s we’ll commit large swathes of each day to linguistic endeavours. Time and other commitments get in the way, and overpromising can sometimes dent our motivation a little.

For that reason, I found myself having to rein it in a little with the new, fresh Verb Blitz apps. I have a lot of exciting ideas for further developments, but to let them take over would be to jeopardise updating the existing functionality in good time. The fact is that by focusing on getting the foundations right – the existing activities – I take care of the urgent needs first, and have lots of time later to do the more fun stuff.

Isn’t that just like learning a language? It can be so tempting to skip the boring introductory units, and head straight to the meaty chapters of a new course book. I feel that urge with every new language project I start. But it’s definitely worth reining it in. Deal with the urgent needs first – basic communication – and then all the fancy bells and whistles can come later, when you’re up and running.

It’s a nice reminder of the importance of sobriety and moderation in project management. Once again, good learning strategy seems to have a lot of touching points with well-planned tech development. Not least the oft-forgotten advice when setting out: first and foremost, keep it simple!

A screenshot of Lingvist in use, demonstrating its lovely, clean interface.

I Befriended a Lingvist (and It Was About Time) [Review]

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I gave Lingvist a whirl this week, a sentence-based language learning app from Estonia that had mysteriously passed way under my radar until now. The verdict: Lingvist, I’m glad I finally found you!

It’s a bit of a match made in Heaven, to be honest, given my love of mass sentence techniques. This app uses in-context, useful sentences to illustrate all of its vocabulary items, drawing on a massive library of items for each language. The sheer size of its libraries should keep even the most avid learners busy for a while, and it’s available in an impressive number of languages:, including Estonian (as you’d expect!), Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish and Swedish, as well as the other ‘biggies’.

It boasts a very smart, clean app design, using an eminently readable font (always an easy thing to overlook in a language app). It has a sensible, just-forgiving-enough approach to mistakes, particularly with accents. And – most impressively – it has the most user-friendly automatic voice input mode I’ve come across in such an app. Even more impressively, it allows Japanese input in all three writing systems.

A screenshot of Lingvist in use, demonstrating its lovely, clean interface.

In use, the app has an excellent approach to exposition and testing. Items, new and old, appear as gap-fill challenges as you perform sentence repetitions. That makes for an engaging routine, even when words you already know pop up – it’s not just learning, it’s practice. As such, it’s the perfect tool if you already know some of the language, but want to start filling in the gaps.

Not a Newbie? Not a Problem!

Talking of non-beginners, Lingvist also features a great placement test mode. For a start, it’s not overlong. Isn’t it always a bit soul-sapping when a new app makes you churn through a 10-minute test off the bat? Lingvist’s snappy check pretty accurately chooses a spot to skip you to very quickly.

To check it out, I performed the test in my strongest foreign language, German. It airlifted me about 85% of the way to the end of its mammoth list. And, proving there’s always something more to learn, the sentences were actually complex and interesting enough to challenge me. That bodes well for forging ahead it with it in my more nascent languages – you can reach a very decent level of language with it.

It tracks that gap-filling with what seems like a quite sophisticated spaced repetition algorithm. Despite that sophisticiation, you have at-a-glance access to all of those stats in a clear, unjargonised format, which  makes the spaced rep process understandable even if you’re new to it. Again, no wonder I love it, given my constant proselytising of the spaced repetition original, Anki.

Generous Trial Period

The best things, of course, are usually worth paying for. And true enough, Lingvist is a premium app, although its pricing is very competitive compared to the likes of Babbel and others, at just over £5 a month on an annual plan. But what’s striking about Lingvist is how generous the team have been with the free trial (at least on iOS). You get a whopping 14 days to try the software out. That’s significantly more than the usual seven days with most – if you’re lucky enough to get a trial at all.

I’m just puzzled over why it took the algorithms so long to push Lingvist in my path, especially since the App Store says it’s been around since 2016. I hope it’s not been such a hidden, under-the-radar app for others, as it really deserves to be up there amongst the best.

If it’s your first time hearing about it too, check it out!

A vocabulary learning plan generated by AI (Bing chat).

AI Prompts for Language Lesson Prep

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I’ve talked previously about the importance of doing prep work for your iTalki and other one-to-one language lessons. Well, AI platforms just make that a lot easier (and free!).

You can generate mini ‘schemes of work’ that are matched precisely to the topics you are studying. With the proliferation of big name, public access AI platforms like Bing and ChatGPT, it’s easier than ever to support your learning in these incredibly tailored ways.

Sample Prompt

The best way to see just how useful this is, is to dive right in. Here’s a ready-made prompt to try with your chatbot of choice; simply change the language, topic and level to suit:

In a week’s time, I have an Italian conversation lesson on the topic of “Renewable Energy”. Could you please create some materials for me to prepare for it? I am level A2 in the language, so the language level of the materials should match that. I’d like:

– a vocabulary of up to 20 words and phrases relevant to the topic, with sample sentences (nouns, verbs, adjectives)
– some questions and answers modelling opinions on the topic using the vocabulary
– a brief introductory paragraph on the topic, again using the vocabulary
– a learning plan for the week
 

Tip: if your AI stops part of the way through (these outputs can be long!), just type Please continue and it will carry on spooling.

The final output will be a mini workbook-style guide to the topic, with vocab, discourse modelling, and reading practice. I like to paste mine into a text document, then export it as a PDF to read on my phone or tablet when I’m out and about. Here’s that sample Italian one (truncated to 10 items for brevity!):

Italian – Renewable Energy Topic Plan (PDF)

Learning instantly organised, in just a few clicks!

It’s All About You…

Experiment with that sample prompt to get exactly the kind of output that works specifically for you. For instance, you could tailor the output much more closely to your own circumstances by adding something like:

Please relate the material to recent developments in X/Y/Z.
 

…where X/Y/Z is your town, your field, your related interests. The sky really is the limit.

And a note of advice: when you find a prompt that works like a charm, save it in a note somewhere. It could become your go-to resource for future language learning.

Happy prompting!

Using Bing's AI chat to play a word association game in French.

AI Chat Prompts for Language Learning Practice

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As AI becomes more and more a fixture of daily life, it’s not surprising to see it sneaking gradually into the language learning setting. The list of AI-infused apps is growing daily: premium chatbots, word games and other practice tools that are taking app stores by storm.

But before you shell out the cash, be reassured that you don’t need to spend a penny to bring the magic of AI to your own routine. You can achieve exactly the same, routine-transforming effects with a few handy prompts and free-to-access AI platforms.

AI for Free

There is an impressive and ever-growing array of AI chatbots to experiment with, some free, some premium. The difference, largely, is in the amount of environment setup that has already been done in premium apps. This is often just a case of configuring the AI to play a certain role, or act in a certain way. But here’s the secret:

You can do this easily yourself, with no development skills required.

It’s simply a case of good prompting. Tell it, in simple, natural English, the rules of the activities you want to run. Define the way you want it to respond to you. Give it a role to play. And state your limits and boundaries. Get a handle on prompting effectively, and popular, free platforms will more than suffice.

The biggie, of course, is ChatGPT, which has a solid free tier for general use. Google have also joined the game with the commendable Bard, which is definitely worth a look. That said, since Microsoft released their new AI-powered Bing chat mode, I’ve been using that more and more. It has an excellent Creative Mode preset, which gives it more unpredictable, humanlike responses. Just bear in mind that Bing currently limits the conversation to a 30-interaction maximum.

The following examples use French and Swedish to show how I’ve been using it to support my own language practice. Just swap in your own target language as required!

Word Games

The simplest kind of game to set up is good old basic word play. The following prompt sets up a turn-based alphabet game, which challenges your vocab recall:

Let’s play a word game in French. We have to go through the alphabet in turns, stating a verb that begins with each letter, plus a short sentence using that verb in context. Let’s play!

One of the best things about using AI for these kinds of language games is the capacity for on-the-fly correction and feedback; it can sometimes appear almost human. Below, I started cheating by inventing words, but Bing was far too clever to be caught out!

Playing a language learning word game - and trying to cheat - with Microsoft Bing's AI-powered chat mode.

Playing a language learning word game – and trying to cheat – with Microsoft Bing’s AI-powered chat mode.

Another fun vocab item practice mode is word association. The following prompt sets up a game where the meaning of each turn’s word must be related to the last. If the bot considers the link too tenuous, you lose the game:

Let’s play a word association game in French. You kick us off with a random noun. We then take it in turns to give a word which is somehow related in meaning to the last. If the link is too tenuous, the player loses. Shall we play?

It’s a great way to recycle vocabulary. You might need to play with the prompt to make your AI teacher a little less strict, though. Mine ended up with a bit of a mean streak. Very harsh!

Bing AI being VERY harsh on me in a word association game.

Bing AI being VERY harsh on me in a word association game.

Story Games (with Tutor Mode!)

When you’re ready to take it beyond words, AI is ready for you. One of the most amusing ways to practise with full sentences is storytelling. Try this prompt for a narrative whirl:

Let’s play a turn-based storytelling game to help me practise my French. We build a story by taking it in turns to add a sentence each time. Please keep the language level to about A2, and tell me about any mistakes I make as we go along. The story should be set in the present day. You start us off!

Note the specification of a language level, as well as the instruction to correct your mistakes as you go. It makes the AI response so rich and helpful that it really is a gift to learn from. To tailor it further, try adding instructions about which tenses to use (narrative present or past?), and even vocabulary topics to crowbar in.

Role-play

Ai chat can prepare you for real-world chat, too. Setting up a foreign language role-play is as simple as describing the situation in as much detail as you like:

Let’s do some role-play to help me practise my French! You play a friendly waiter in a Paris café, and I am a customer. I enter the café and you come over to take my order. You realise I’m learning French and so give me very simple descriptions of all the dishes. But you keep mishearing me, so I have to repeatedly rephrase what I ask for.

This can be as straight-laced or as silly as you like. Sometimes, it’s a case of the crazier, the better. There’s nothing like a bit of silliness to increase engagement and recall.

You can even target the chat more by priming the AI with the actual vocabulary items you want to lever in. It’s a great way to recycle words over and over again:

I want to practise talking in Swedish about family. Imagine you’re a friend of mine and we’re having a chat about our families. Keep the language level to about A2 on the CEFR language scale, and using the following words as much as possible: mamma, pappa, bror, syster, vänner, snäll, vänlig, lita på, besöka

Whether you’re new to AI, or just beginning to experiment with it yourself, I hope these sample prompts give you some useful, fun practice ideas. Do you have any good ones to add to the list? Let us know in the comments!

An old book about to cook in the Philips UV-C Disinfection Box.

The Philips UV-C Disinfection Box : An Unlikely Language Learning Ally?

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It’s not often I rave about a purchase that isn’t a language book. But I think I might have fallen in love with my latest gadget acquisition, the Philips UV-C Disinfection Box.

Language learning and automated sanitisation don’t seem like natural bedfellows, I’ll admit. But bear with me – there is a connection, I promise.

I’ve been an avid collector of vintage language books for some time now. I particularly enjoy hunting down old Teach Yourself books from decades gone by. They’re both quaint and practical. I can enjoy all the anachronisms of their stilted dialogues and translation exercises at the same time as getting a lot from the no-nonsense grammatical approach.

But, in the words of my Nan, sometimes you just don’t know where they’ve been. And, for an OCD germaphobe, that can be a problem. Of course there are lots of tips and tricks for cleaning up and restoring old books, and I use them all. But there’s that wee niggling doubt for a sensitive soul like me.

Dial ‘D’ for Disinfection

I came across UV-C disinfection techniques during the Covid-19 pandemic, where they were touted in the press as one tool that libraries, amongst other places, were using to virus-proof their returns. Just seconds of a low-power ultraviolet blast apparently kills any sign of dangerous microbes.

Wow. The cleaning freak in me was piqued. This, I thought, was an OCD-er’s dream.

Sadly, at the time, they were prohibitively expensive. Perhaps, I thought cynically, the inflated price was a result of pandemic-driven demand. Or, perhaps less cynically, it was just the premium of new(ish) technology. But in any case, I bided my time and eventually forgot about them – until they recently popped into my line of sight again.

You see, I’d added one particular model – my inner hygiene-geek’s dream model – to the Amazon price tracker site, CamelCamelCamel.com. I’d requested an alert whenever the price dropped from £170-ish to – I thought – a very unlikely £60. And guess what? It only went and did just that.

The Philips UV-C Disinfection Box.

My pride and joy, the Philips UV-C Disinfection Box.

So now, I’m the proud owner of a large disinfection box. It works like a charm – you lock in your book or otherwise, press the button, and it’s blasted with a sanitising beam for a number of seconds. It destroys all bacteria and viruses in Philips’ lab tests, so they say, which gives this second-hand book buyer a huge peace of mind.

I guess this is a story about the joys of clean books, on the surface (in more ways than one). But perhaps more usefully, it’s a reminder to put your most wished-for items onto CamelCamelCamel.com!

A book in the Philips UV-C Disinfection Box.

Cooking a book in the Philips UV-C Disinfection Box.