Category: Technology

A neon lock with a glowing owl motif, reminiscent of Duolingo

Green Handcuffs – Duolingo and the Walled Garden of Welsh

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What happens when you pour your heart into learning a language on service X, then service X mothballs the resource? It’s a situation many Welsh learners found themselves in this week, as Duolingo announced an indefinite pause to further development of its Welsh course. 

The immediate question is where do these learners go? There are other Welsh courses, of course, like the excellent materials at LearnWelsh.cymru. But the Duolingo announcement begs a further question: how do these learners take their progress with them? Progress data, the result of weeks, months, years of hard learning work, is locked into Duolingo’s proprietary system.

Now, you can already request your personal data from Duolingo. The Duolingo Data Vault is definitely a welcome addition in data transparency, allowing you to access personal data records the site holds on you. But crucially, language-based progress is missing. There’s nothing to say what you’ve studied, item for item. That means there’s no way to pick up where you left off elsewhere, with a true record of where you are.

No wonder users feel a bit stuck inside a course consigned to gather dust.

Duolingo Data Vault files, unzipped.

Duolingo Data Vault files, unzipped.

Interoperability and Language Learning

It all sounded very familiar after tech activist Cory Doctorow’s recent discussion of open internet practices in The Internet Con. This quick read (well worth a look for anyone invested in apps and services – ie., all of us) bemoans the walled gardens that Big Tech firms have become. They’re great places to be, when they work for/with us. But when they suddenly change at the whim of execs, the lack of interoperability – standards or conventions that allow you to use data from one service on another – leaves us stranded and at their mercy.

Don’t like a recent update? Tough, you’ll just have to stay, or start from scratch on another service.

It’s not for a lack of standards. Language learning platforms have long used industry-wide formats to allow interoperability. Take the plain old CSV (comma-separated value) spec. You’ve long been able export your Anki deck in this plain text format, and import it into another service like Quizlet or Educandy.

Not to be too hard on Duolingo (we love it really), there’s a clear counterargument to allowing full export of full vocabulary and phrase lists, as with Anki and Quizlet decks. The full complement of learning text is the result of lots of hard work on company time; it’s a copyrighted resource just as a course book is.

Opening the Duolingo Garden Wall

But when it’s tied to user progress, it becomes something else; a personal record of items we’ve committed to memory. Other programs export this as a matter of course. Anki, for example, will export frequency and accuracy data alongside vocabulary item entries. It shouldn’t be too hard to export this subset of Duolingo material in a universal format that could be loaded without fuss into an app like Anki.

Duolingo might well fret about losing users if the effort costs of leaving were reduced like this. No big tech corp is under obligation to organise its data in a way that helps users migrate. But you can imagine a world of interoperable ‘take your data with you’ standards to have a double-edged benefit.

First off, it could incentivise Duolingo to strive for constant betterment, to be additive rather than reductive in its updates. The race would be to the top, rather than the bottom, to maintain a winning app for all. There’d be an open door, but nobody would feel the need to defect (or the resentment that they can’t).

Likewise, there’s a general benefit even if the resources simply aren’t there for a Welsh continuation on Duo. Course migration standards would allow smaller companies to step in and fill in the gaps. Duo could focus on its core projects and nobody would feel linguistically homeless. And, of course, if Duolingo offered the missing service again in future, it would be easy to move right back.

Perhaps it’s time to make a request of our beloved owl in the name of an open web for linguists.  As the trailblazer that you are, could you be a leader in open standards, prising ajar the door to these walled gardens?

A neon journal written by a neon hand. Journal writing for foreign language practice.

Journal Writing for Language Learners – With Added AI!

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Writing is key to recycling language learning material. I’ve always championed the boost journal writing offers to language learners as a regular writing habit. But once you’ve made the decision to journal, pen poised above paper, the question often lingers: what on earth to write about?

When I journal in a foreign language, my first instinct is to jot down what happened in my week. That’s a great start. But if you do that all the time, you’ll find the vocab repetitive. Unless you have a celebrity lifestyle, you’ll more often than not be talking about the same things (mainly lots of coffee and work). And it’s always in the same narrative style, too – lots of past tense and not much else.

Instead, it’s handy to get some prompting for your journal exploits. Ideally, a language teacher can do that for you as a homework task – but with AI platforms ever more up to the task of playing teach, it’s as easy as pie to get some pottted prompts for diary writing when learning independently.

Here’s a sample prompt for prompts you can try on Bing, ChatGPT and other platforms:

I use journal writing in French to practise my writing skills in the language and recycle vocabulary and grammar that I’ve been learning. My level is around A2 (upper beginner). I’d like a list of twenty prompts for journal entries on different everyday topics to encourage more variety in my writing. Please provide the prompts in both the target language and English translation, and a comma-separated list of five key terms I might want to work into my piece. Thanks!

After the main request, I’ve also added a request for some helpful vocab hints in here. You could even ask for grammar tips here. What kinds of structures would be useful to revise for this topic, for instance? Reflexive verbs for daily routine, perhaps? In any case, build in as much help and support into the prompt as you need.

After that, it’s just a case of building journal writing into your regular habits. Let your prompt list guide the way, and watch your written fluency take off!

 

Journal prompts, Microsoft Bing-style

Journal prompts, Microsoft Bing-style

 

Journal prompts, ChatGPT-style

Journal prompts, ChatGPT-style

 

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!