If you create language learning content – for yourself, or for your students – then you need to check out the latest update to Claude AI.
Along with a competition-beating new model release, Anthropic have added a new feature called Artifacts to the web interface. Artifacts detects when there is self-contained content it can display – like webpage code, or worksheet text – and it pops that into a new window, running any interactive elements on the fly. In a nutshell, you can see what you create as you create it.
This makes it incredibly easy to wrap your learning content up in dynamic formats like HTML and JavaScript, then visually preview and tweak it to perfection before publishing online. This favours interactive elements like inline games, which can be impressively slick when authored by Claude’s Sonnet 3.5; it turns out that model update is a real platform-beater when it comes to coding.
Using Claude’s new Artifacts Feature
You can give Artifacts a whirl for free, as Claude’s basic tier includes a limited number of interactions with its top model every few hours. That’s more than enough to generate some practical, useful material to use straight away.
First of all, you’ll need to ensure that the feature is enabled. After logging into Claude, locate the little scientific flask icon by the text input and click it.
Claude – locating the experimental features toggle
A window should pop up with the option to enable Artifacts if it’s not already on.
Claude – enabling Artifacts.
Now it’s on, you just need a prompt that will generate some ‘Artifactable’ content. Try the prompt below for an interactive HTML worksheet with a reading passage and quiz:
Interactive HTML Worksheet Prompt
Create an original interactive workbook for students of French, as a self-contained, accessible HTML page. The target language level should be A2 on the CEFR scale. The topic of the worksheet is “Summer Holidays“. The objective is to equip students with the vocabulary and structures to chat to native speakers about the topic.
The worksheet format is as follows:
– An engaging introductory text (250 words) using clear and idiomatic language
– A comprehensive glossary of key words and phrases from the text in table format
– A gap-fill exercise recycling the vocabulary and phrases – a gapped phrase for each question with four alternative answer buttons for students to select. If they select the correct one, it turns green and the gap in the sentence is filled in. If they choose incorrectly, the button turns red. Students may keep trying until they get the correct answer.
Ensure the language is native-speaker quality and error-free. Adopt an attractive colour scheme and visual style for the HTML page.
With Artifacts enabled, Claude should spool out the worksheet in its own window. You will be able to test the interactive elements in situ – and then ask Claude to tweak and update as required! Ask it to add scoring, make it drag-and-drop – it’s malleable ad infinitum.
An interactive worksheet created by Claude, displaying in the new Artifacts window
Once created, you can switch to the Artifacts Code tab, then copy-paste your page markup into a text editor to save as an .html file. Then, it’s just a case of finding a place to upload it to.
Pulling It Together
After you’re done with the worksheets, you can even ask Claude to build a menu system to pull them all together:
Now create a fun, graphical, colourful Duolingo-style topic menu which I can use to link to this worksheet and others I will create. Use big, bold illustrations. Again, ensure that it is a completely self-contained HTML file.
Here’s the result I got from running that – again, instantly viewable and tweakable:
A language website menu created by Claude, displayed in the Artifacts feature.
You’ve now got the pieces to start to stitch together into something much bigger than a single worksheet.
Instant website – without writing a line of code!
Have you had chance to play with Claude’s new Artifacts feature yet? Let us know in the comments what you’ve been creating!
We all have a sticking point somewhere in our target languages. For me and Modern Greek, it was, for too long, the imperfect tense.
I noticed it in conversation classes with my teacher. I’d be narrating a story or incident, flowing easily enough when talking about single events in the past. I saw, I heard, I went… All simple past, or aorist, in Greek: είδα, άκουσα, πήγα (ída, ákusa, píga).
It all unravelled when I needed to express what was ongoing. I was talking, I was sleeping, I was thinking… The kind of thing we use the past continuous for in English. We use this device very frequently in storytelling, especially when one action undercuts or interrupts another. Think: I was watching the TV when…
All this means that if you only have a handle on the simple past, you can only really tell half the story.
When I spot a gap like this, I like to simplify it before tackling it. And with verbs, a nice simplification trick for learning is to only learn the parts you use regularly at first. For me, the sticking points came when talking to my teacher about what I was doing.
So I’d focus first on learning just the imperfect patterns for the first person, singular, the ‘I’ form.
The Imperfect Tense in Modern Greek – Egotistical Edition
Here – greatly simplified – is the ‘cheat sheet’ I used to get a handle on the imperfect tense in Modern Greek.
Type A (verbs stressed before the final syllable like γράφω – write)
The stress moves back a syllable – if there’s no syllable to move back to, you add a stressed ε- at the beginning. The first person singular ending is -α.
Example: γράφω (gráfo, I write) – έγραφα (égrafa, I was writing)
In many ways, this is the easiest one – it has the same pattern as the aorist, which many master early on, but without any root change. Compare έγραψα (égrapsa – I wrote).
Type B ( verbs with final stressed -ώ or -άω like μιλάω – speak)
These verbs have a whole set of endings to themselves – variations on -ούσα (-úsa). There’s no stress change – we just substitute the -ώ/-άω for -ούσα in the first person singular:
Example: μιλάω (miláo, I speak) – μιλούσα (milúsa, I was speaking)
Passive and Deponent Verbs (ending in -μαι like κοιμάμαι – sleep)
Now these are the strange ones. Although not so strange, if you’ve already learnt the word for I was, which is ήμουν (ímun) in Modern Greek. The verb ‘to be’ – irregular in so many languages – actually follows the endings of the passive verbs, so you already knew the pattern without realising. In the first person singular, the imperfect tense takes the ending -όμουν (-ómun):
Example: κοιμάμαι (kimáme, I sleep) – κοιμόμουν (kimómun – I was sleeping)
Roundup
So there you have it. Rather than learning a whole paradigm of six persons for three types of verb – 18 forms – you can get your first grip on the imperfect tense in Modern Greek by learning three examples. To round them up:
Group
Present (1ps)
Imperfect (1ps)
I
γράφω
έγραφα
II
μιλάω
μιλούσα
Passive
κοιμάμαι
κοιμόμουν
Needless to say, when you’ve memorised these, changing the person – to you, she, we and so on – is just a case of adjusting the ending slightly. The -α (-a) changes to -ες (-es) for ‘you’, for example, while the -όμουν (-ómun) changes to -όσουν (-ósun). But that’s for the next stage of your functional, chunked-up tense learning. In the meantime, you can enjoy being able to express what you were doing in the past when chatting with your teacher!
The one-form-at-a-time focus can be a motivation-saving shortcut for heavily inflected languages. It’s helped me with other tricky verb forms in Greek, as well as other languages. It’s part of the wider truth that nothing is too big to learn if you break it down into chunks – advice worth remembering when you keep coming up against stubborn gaps in your language learning knowledge.
Have you had similar experiences when learning conjugations? Which were your trickiest tenses? And how did you master them? Let us know in the comments below!
It’s typically the last of the Gaelic cases you cover in classes. And in many ways, it’s the most fiendish. Yes, it’s the genitive case, the case of possession.
I felt possessed at several times this week, I must admit – possessed by a language conundrum I couldn’t work out. It started with a puzzle. I had two example phrases I’d written from somewhere (where, I do not remember – a bit of a notes-taking fail, I’m afraid!). They are:
ann an diofar dòigh bho… (in a different way from…)
ann an diofar dhòighean bho… (in different ways from…)
I knew diofar (different) took the genitive. But I didn’t know what was causing that d > dh lenition in the plural. Do all plural genitive nouns lenite, or was I overgeneralising? I didn’t fit the pattern where there’s a plural definite article – that would be nan dòighean (of the ways/methods) instead, without lenition.
I’d obviously got quite an incomplete grasp of the genitive plural in my Scottish Gaelic memory banks.
On the genitive plural trail
Anyway, simple enough to look up, right? Nope. The puzzle led me on a bit of a wild goose chase. It turns out that there aren’t many really comprehensive explanations of the genitive out there. There’s plenty on the genitive singular, but just a little on the plural here and there – and only then just with the definite article.
Until I checked some older, out-of-print books (my super-economical secret weapon!). Two old Gaelic course books have really clear, cover-all-bases sections on the genitive case:
The first of these in particular was really no-nonsense and clear. In fact, there’s a whole section dedicated to the genitive plural. There, in section 68c, it states clearly:
When the article does not precede a genitive plural noun, the noun is automatically lenited. In other words indefinite genitive plurals are lenited, e.g.: mòran ghillean (G, pl) a large number of boys, many boys beagan bhòrd (G, pl) a small number of tables
Of course, mòran and beagan trigger that same indefinite genitive that diofar does. By now, I’d worked it out myself, of course – but it’s always good to have confirmation from a proper grammar.
It just shows that more up-to-date materials aren’t always the best. It’s frustrating that there wasn’t anything more comprehensive and current out there for Scottish Gaelic, although perhaps not surprising. But thankfully, older, fuller works are still available with a little second-hand digging.
Can’t find the answer? An old (maybe not even that old) book might be what you’re looking for.
After a bit of deep-delving, it’s the voice clone features that have me hooked right now. ElevenLabs can make a digital version of your voice from just 30 seconds of training speech. And it’s fast. I expected a bit of a wait for audio processing the first time I used it. But no – after reading in a couple of passages of sample text, my digital TTS voice was ready to use within seconds.
For a quick ‘n’ easy tool, it does a brilliant job of picking up general accent. It identified mine as British English, captured most of my Midlands features (it struggled with my really low u in bus, though – maybe more training would help), and it got my tone bang on. Scarily so… I can understand why cybersecurity pundits are slightly nervous about tech like this.
Your Voice, Another Language
The most marvellous thing, though, was using my voice to read foreign language texts. Although not 100% native-sounding – the voice was trained on me reading English, of course – it’s uncannily accurate. Listening to digital me reading German text, I’d say it sounds like a native-ish speaker. Perhaps someone who’s lived in Germany for a decade, and retains a bit of non-native in their speech.
But as far as models go, that’s a pretty high standard for any language learner.
ElevenLabs’ TTS interface with the custom voice ‘Richard’ selected, ready to read some German.
The crux of it is that you can have your voice reading practice passages for memory training (think: island technique). There’s an amazing sense of personal connect that comes from that – that’s what you will sound like, when you’ve mastered this.
It also opens up the idea for tailoring digital resources with sound files read by ‘you’. Imagine a set of interactive language games for students, where the voice is their teacher’s. Incredible stuff.
The catch? Much of the brand new tech isn’t available to the average user-on-the-street yet.
That’s why I was thrilled to happen across TTS service ElevenLabs recently. ElevenLabs’ stunning selection of voices powers a number of eLearning and audiobook sites already, and it’s no hype to say that they sound as close to human as you can get right now.
Even better, you can sign up for a free account that gives you 10,000 characters of text-to-speech conversion each month. For $5 a month you can up that to 30,000 characters too, as well as access voice-cloning features. Just imagine the hours of fun if you want to hear ‘yourself’ speak any number of languages!
Using ElevenLabs in Your Own Learning
There’s plenty to do for free, though. For instance, if you enjoy the island technique in your learning, you can get ElevenLabs to record your passages for audio practice / rote memorising. I make this an AI double-whammy, using ChatGPT to help prepare my topical ‘islands’ before pasting them into ElevenLabs.
The ChatGPT > ElevenLabs workflow is also brilliant for dialogue modelling. On my recent Sweden trip, I knew that a big conversational contact point would be ordering at coffee shops. This is the prompt I used to get a cover-all-bases model coffee-shop convo:
Create a comprehensive model dialogue in Swedish to help me learn and practise for the situation “ordering coffee in a Malmö coffee shop”.
Try to include the language for every eventuality / question I might be asked by the coffee shop employee. Ensure that the language is colloquial and informal, and not stilted.
The output will be pasted into a text-to-speech generator, so don’t add speaker names to the dialogue lines – just a dash will suffice to indicate a change of speaker.
I then ran off the audio file with ElevenLabs, and hey presto! Custom real-world social prep. You can’t specify different voices in the same file, of course. But you could run off the MP3 twice, in different voices, then splice it up manually in an audio editor like Audacity for the full dialogue effect. Needless to say, it’s also a great way for teachers to make custom listening activities.
The ElevenLabs voices are truly impressive – it’s worth setting up a free account just to play with the options and come up with your own creative use cases. TTS is set to only get better in the coming months – we’re excited to see where it leads!
The addition of voice chat mode to ChatGPT – soon available even to free users in an impressive, all-new format – opens up tons of possibilities for AI speaking practice. When faced with it for the first time, however, learners can find that it’s all a bit undirected and woolly. To make the most of it for targeted speaking practice, it needs some nudging with prompts.
Since AI crashed into the language learning world, the prompt bank has filled with ways to prime your chatbot for more effective speaking practice and prep. But there’s one activity I’ve been using lately that offers both structure, tailored to your level and topic, and a lot of fun. I call it So Interview Me!, and it involves you playing an esteemed expert on a topic of your choice, with ChatGPT as the prime-time TV interviewer.
So Interview Me!
Here’s an example you can paste into ChatGPT Plus straight away (as text first, then switching to voice mode after the initial response):
Let’s role-play so I can practise my Swedish with you. You play the role of a TV interviewer on a news programme. I play an esteemed expert on the topic of ‘the history of Eurovision’. Conversational turn by turn, interview me in the target language all about the topic. Don’t add any translations or other directions – you play the interviewer and no other role. Wind up the interview after about 15 turns. Keep the language quite simple, around level B1 on the CEFR scale. Are you ready? Start off by introducing me and asking the first question!
The fun of it is that you are the star of the show. You can completely throw yourself into it, interacting with your interviewer with all the gusto and gumption of a true expert. Or you can have some fun with it, throwing it off with silly answers and bending the scenario to your will (maybe you turn out not to be the expert!).
Either way, it’s a brilliant one to wind up and set going before you start the washing up!
Just a couple of weeks after the excitement around Hume.ai, OpenAI has joined the emotive conversational bandwagon with a stunning new release of its GPT-4o model.
GPT-4o is a big deal for language learners because it is multimodal in much more powerful ways than previous models. It interacts with the world more naturally across text, audio and vision in ways that mimic our own interactions with language speakers. Demos have included the model reacting to the speaker’s appearance and expression, opening a path to more realistic digital conversation practice than ever.
As with Hume, its voice capabilities have been updated with natural-sounding emotion and intonation, along with a deeper understanding of the speaker’s tone. It even does a better job at sarcasm and irony, long the exclusive domain of human speakers. Heck, it can even sing now. Vocal, emotional nuance – at least simulated – does seem to be the latest big leap forward in AI, transforming the often rather staid conversations into something uncannily humanlike. And as with many of these developments, it almost feels like it was made with us linguists in mind.
As for the multimodal capabilities, we’ll have to wait a little longer, unfortunately – chat updates are being propagated more gradually, although you may already the next time you open chat mode, you may already get the message that big changes are coming. Definitely a case of watch this space – and I don’t know about you, but I’m already impatiently refreshing my ChatGPT app with increasing frequency!
If you’ve kept up with my copious social postings, you’ll know that I’ve spent the last week in beautiful Malmö, following my Eurovision language dreams. Perhaps not the calmest of years to choose – the contest itself was mired in controversies that just seemed to be compounded by poor decision after poor decision. At times, the atmosphere felt incredibly on edge. Needless to say, the joy that was Switzerland’s Nemo winning was the tonic we all needed.
As for my language goals, though, it’s been a blast.
I put all that to the test this week. And I think I can finally say, without piquing my impostor syndrome to breaking point, that I speak Swedish. Ja, äntligen pratar jag svenska! Granted, coffee shop counters have been the main playground for my newfound skills, but with each interaction I’ve felt more and more confident using it.
Avoiding (Un)Helpful hands
One obstacle I was very wary of at first was the helpful English-speaker. You know the type if you’ve been to a country with really strong, widespread anglophone knowledge. You try out your target language, only to get English back at you by default. It’s often enough to scare you back into your shy language learner box and accept defeat.
In Malmö, however, it didn’t happen once. That’s perhaps more to do with my obsessive fascination with mimicry, rather than Malmoans’ inherent desire to help learners of Swedish. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Swedish podcasts and watching Swedish series to train my ear. Then, in my spare time, I’ve rehearsed speaking phrases out loud, laying it on thick with the accent and paying particular attention to the Swedish tones. I’d clown around with it, role-playing an authentic Swede. Melodifestivalen introductions were particularly fruitful ground for this – låt nummer ett : Carola! I’d pronounce in the shower, in my finest continuity announcer svenska.
It may all sound completely bonkers, but it worked a treat. I ended up sounding decent enough for Swedes to assume I had a better grip of the language than I probably (certainly) do, but it stopped the dreaded automatic-switch-to-English, and gave me more precious time practising with real people. Once my level became apparent and the deception was revealed, I could hop in with a jag lär mig svenska (I’m learning Swedish), which resulted in some nice compliments and occasionally, a new word or two explained by the other party. My favourite was vispgrädde, whipped cream, explained by a very patient and lovely Espresso House barista!
So, I’ve come out of my Swedish adventure with a refreshed appreciation of accent-training as an indispensable part of any language learning regime. Podcast-shadowing, talking to yourself, singing in the shower – however daft it feels, it just works. Give it a go if you’re sceptical – I bet you’ll be surprised.
The only thing I have to do now is relearn how to speak Norwegian again without sounding Swedish…
If the socials are anything to go by, so many of us language learners are already using AI platforms for conversation practice – whether text-typed, or spoken with speech-enabled platforms like ChatGPT.
Conversational interaction is something that LLMs – large language models – were created for. In fact, language learning and teaching seem like an uncannily good fit for AI. It’s almost like it was made for us.
But there’s one thing that’s been missing up to now – emotional awareness. In everyday conversation with other humans, we use a range of cues to gauge our speaking partner’s attitude, intentions and general mood. AI – even when using speech recognition and text-to-speech – is flat by comparison. It can only simulate true conversational interplay.
A new LLM is set to change all that. Hume.ai has empathy built-in. It uses vocal cues to determine the probable mindset of the speaker for each utterance. For each input, it selects a set of human emotions, and weights them. For instance, it might decide that what you said was 60% curious, 40% anxious and 20% proud. Then, mirroring that, it replies with an appropriate intonation and flex.
The platform already supports over 50 languages. You can try out a demo in English here, and prepare to be impressed – its guesses can be mind-bogglingly spot-on. Although it’s chiefly for developer access right now, the potential usefulness to language learning is so clear that we should hopefully see the engine popping up in language platforms in the near future!
If you didn’t already know, I’ve been spending a year Swedifying my Norwegian. The goal? Eurovision fun days in Malmö, of course. And as the final test of my newfound svenska draws close, it seems like a good time to take stock of what – and how – I’ve been learning.
I’m a big fan of finding content that speaks to you, be that books or television and film. Personally, I’m much more likely to keep coming back to learning content if I find it fun. With that in mind, and through much trial and error, I’ve found some things that I love in Swedish – things that have made my Swedish journey so much more effective.
Here are some of the biggies from my past twelve months!
Crime Fiction
It bears repeating: extensive reading is one of the most sure-fire ways to solidify your familiarity and ease with a foreign language. It’s the vastness of the input – as you soak up a story, things are bound to stick. And this particular genre was a bit of a no-brainer, as I also loved crime fiction in my original scandilang, Norwegian (check our Jørn Lier Horst – the author of the first novel I read completely in Norwegian, Blindgang).
Thanks to a nice little Swedish section at the London branch of Foyles, I found one I liked the look of – Benvittring by Johan Theorin – and have been tiptoeing through that for the last few moths. It has all the dark, moody suspense we’ve come to love with Scandi noir, and fits neatly into a series – the Ölandssviten books – if I want more when I come to the end (and I will – it’s great). Maybe it’s because the genre is so formulaic, but it all seems so familiar – Horst and Theorin could be writing cousins.
Although a few of Theorin’s works have been translated in English, unfortunately Benvittring hasn’t, yet. That does give me the sense that I’m one of the first outside Sweden to read it, which feels very special and exclusive. The downside, of course, is that I can’t recommend it to friends who don’t speak the language.
Now, I love some light listening in the morning when I’m going about my bits and pieces. Something chatty and informal, that you can have on in the background and selectively drop into, much like picking at a smörgåsbord (which, incidentally, means sandwich table in Swedish). Swedish Radio‘s first station, P1, fits the bill perfectly – lots of opinion-piece phone-ins, interesting documentaries, the odd overacted melodrama, and hourly bulletins to satisfy the news junkie in me.
Better still, Swedish Radio is available as a third-party skill on Alexa, and I do love to recruit my digital assistants as language learning buddies. So it’s as easy as putting my morning coffee on and exclaiming Alexa, play Swedish Radio to get some listening practice on. I let my attention dip in and out of it as I go about my other business, and I haven’t done any structured or focused listening with it. But it’s been fundamental in re-tuning my ear to the shape of Swedish – vital as someone hopping over from a very closely related language.
Young Royals
Now I know I’m not alone here, and I’m in much larger company than other Swedish learners. The Netflix coming-of-age drama Young Royals depicts the blossoming romance between Crown Prince Wilhelm and classmate Simon, and has been a bit of a breakout sensation. There’s even an official Spotify playlist, which has introduced me to new music much more with it than I can admit to being. Think The Crown, but cooler (and probably no less made up).
The show’s popularity has led many to the language, too. There are whole Reddits about Young Royals sparking a Duolingo obsession. Despite that, the next-best thing – after it being in Swedish, of course – is that there’s a dubbed English version too, so I can recommend it to non-linguaphile friends and family.
What’s more, once you watch, and rate, a Swedish-language show on Netflix, you’ll have more recommended to you. Thanks to my Young Royals binge, I’ve discovered a whole lot more Swedish content on the platform since.
Drag Race Sweden
Staying with the queer theme, here, I credit the fabulous Drag Race Sweden with one very useful power-up: colloquialisms. Not the odd idiom here and there, but the whole gamut of real, everyday, lived Swedish spoken between friends. The language used between the competing queens is so informal that it’s an antidote to the staid dialogues of standard text books. It’s thanks to that – along with the accompanying Swedish subtitles – that I’ve learnt vocab like taggad (psyched) and peppad (stoked) and so much other emotive language that is totally transferrable to the Eurovision context. Yes, in Malmö I’ll be sharing my colloquialised opinions left, right and centre, and it’s all thanks to Robert Fux. That’s not to mention the catchphrases… Må besta quinna vinna! A sentiment that fits Eurovision like a glove.
Getting into a foreign language TV show opens up a web of connected socials, too, and Drag Race Sweden has provided some very entertaining accounts. In particular, if you’re interested in the accents of Skåne – the Swedish region where Malmö is situated – then competing queen Elecktra’s TikTok is worth a follow. There’s even another Eurovision link-up there, as she was one of the contestants at this year’s Melodifestivalen. And of course it was in Skåne dialect, which she had form for after performing the hilarious Unna daj (Treat Yourself) in her season. Banna maj was every bit as wonderfully camp. #ElecktraWasRobbed, indeed.
By the way, for learners of Swedish and other languages, Wow Presents, which hosts most of the worldwide Drag Race content, is well worth the £4-ish a month it costs to subscribe. Fabulous, binge-worthy fun that’ll have you laughing and learning.
Courses and Traditional Content
Of course, I also invested my time and dosh in a couple of courses at the beginning of this journey. How could I not, being the book fiend that I am. As a Norwegian speaker, though, not many courses are geared up to the false – or rather, transferring – beginners, and I found it a slog to get past those early chapters where it seemed as though I was treading the same ground all over again. My Swedish side-step, piggybacking on media content created for the Swedish market was, by comparison, much more dynamic, interest-holding and effective as a strategy.
That’s not to say that some traditional course books haven’t been useful. Teach Yourself Swedish Tutor, for example, is a great dip-in-and-out book with short, snappy chapters, each with a tight grammar focus. Alongside that, old stalwart Duolingo has been predictably very handy for new vocab (and giving it the Swedish treatment has also fostered a much healthier use of the app).
So, armed with my newfound Swedish, off to Malmö I go. Through the fun stuff I used along the way to learning Swedish, I feel I know Sweden itself a lot better, too. And on top of that, it’s been an ace low-stakes, low-pressure, high-entertainment-value way to learn. As such, it’s been one of the most enjoyable, guilt-free dabblings that I’ve had with a foreign language.
