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

AI for Language Learners – Book Now Available!

September 10, 2023September 10, 20231 Comment

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.

AI for Language Learners

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

September 3, 2023September 3, 2023Leave a comment

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!

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

AI Prompts for Language Lesson Prep

July 9, 20231 Comment

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

June 25, 2023July 9, 20232 Comments

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.

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.

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!

ChatGPT for Language Learners

January 1, 2023July 9, 2023Leave a comment

The buzz around AI imaging seems only five minutes ago, yet there’s another brand new tool creating ripples. And this time, it speaks.

ChatGTP is an AI model that processes natural language, making sense of instructions and carrying them out. You could think of it as a kind of ask me anything bot, and it went truly viral at the end of last year thanks to its uncannily human-like language abilities.

Of course, it didn’t take long for the language community to see the potential. The algorithm has already captured the imaginations of teachers, who are using it to great time-saving effect in generating quick and simple lesson plans. No surprise, then, that the polyglot community has followed suit in exploring the new tech’s potential for supporting language learning.

As with all tech, the best way to assess it for yourself is to get your hands dirty. In that spirit, I headed to OpenAI.com’s ChatGPT portal to see for myself what it could do. Note that this might be easier said than done right now; lately, you’re more likely to see the message ChatGPT is at capacity right now as the fellow curious inundate the platform with requests.

ChatGPT for (Language) Beginners

I started off at the place that seemed most fitting: at the beginning. What about some learning tips for a newcomer to a specific language, for a specific purpose? ChatGPT turned out solid phrase lists, and – impressively – not always the most obvious cut-and-paste choices. Accompanying advice was on the whole quite generic, but very sensible and practical:

What I love is the variability; ask the same question twice, and you’re unlikely to get the same answer. There’s always some overlap, but it’s interesting to see how suggestions vary from answer to answer:

Occasionally, you get a bit of extra advice for free, too:

ChatGPT seems really good at making what we might call potted lessons like these, which explains its popularity as a quick lesson plan generator.

Off the Beaten Path

Where it struggles, I found, was when you stray from the mainstream path – presumably, fields where the algorithm finds much scarcer material to work with. For example, Explain how tense works with Modern Hebrew verbs produced a very convincing piece of text that sounded like it came straight from a Routledge Comprehensive Grammar. Unfortunately, the Hebrew itself was an absolute hash, omitting any mention of vowel patterns, and focusing on suffixes, as if Hebrew were a typical Romance language or similar.

The problem, I’m guessing, is a paucity of sources. I’m not sure where it cobbled the points together from, but they seemed like a very bad, rookie guess at how to express tense in Hebrew, based on a very limited set of observations. Perhaps I’m being harsh; experimenting with different question phrasing might have improved things, and I’m impressed enough that it dealt so well with Greek.

It’s early days, though. Development is entering a new stage, backed by some big money, and refinements will come thick and fast. Crucially, the spark is already lit; ChatGPT has captured imaginations, and it already looks like a truly helpful and practical tool is emerging.

Have you taken your first steps with ChatGPT as a language learner? Let us know how you got on in the comments!

An array of neon signs of nonsense words on a wall. Image generated by the Stable Diffusion AI algorithm.

Polyglot in the Machine: AI for Language Learners

December 11, 20221 Comment

AI is the order of the day lately. Have you seen how many fantasy photos have been filling up Instagram lately? Thanks to the now wide availability of open source AI algorithms, some powerful computing power is in the hands of users courtesy of apps like Dawn AI and Lensa. Type in a few words, and the computer does the painting.

It’s new tech, opening new possibilities alongside new ethical challenges that users are gradually becoming sensitive to. But the benefit to individual language learners here is apparent very little imagination stretch. First and foremost, these algorithms parse human language. So why not, for instance, type in some target language – say, ein Hund mit grünen Augen (a dog with green eyes) – and see if the picture matches what you meant to say? It should act as a kind of machine validation that the language you produce makes sense.

It already works to a point with some languages. Models like Dall-E (seen at work below in the web-based Craiyon.com) cope reasonably well with non-complex, non-English prompts.

A screenshot from Craiyon.com, a web-based AI image generator built on DALL-E Mini.

It can be hit and miss, but Craiyon understood my German for the most part!

So it works – up to a point. The current stumbling block is linguistic and cultural bias. For a start, models like Stable Diffusion were initially developed and trained with English input. And as one web experimenter shows, non-English results can leave a lot to be desired, with a definite advantage for Western European languages. This isn’t surprising, given that the technique samples from pre-existing web content; the predominance of certain languages means there is a lot more of that to learn from.

Ai Work In Progress

It’s clear these techniques are nascent and emerging, as most casual users will admit. Even if English is your target learning language, for example, images can frequently be so off the mark that you may question whether it understood a single word of your prompt.

Things are improving, though, especially with regular updates to the Stable Diffusion model. There are even a couple of language augmentation projects floating around in beta, including. one that adds ‘Japanglish’ capabilities to the current algorithm, overcoming one particular cultural blindspot.

And, if you have the skills, you can add to many ongoing open source projects to extend and finesse the capabilities of AI algorithms. I’m sad to report that that isn’t in my skillset, but it’ll be interesting to follow how this develops over the coming months!

Amazon Echo Dot - Alexa for Language Learning

Alexa: Your Personal, Digital Native Speaker

September 10, 2017September 10, 2017Leave a comment

It’s a language learning ‘secret’ that isn’t so secret any more: changing the language setting on your smart devices is a brilliant way to create a personalised immersion environment without going abroad. And the recent explosion of artificially intelligent digital assistant devices is taking this one step further. Voice-activated gadgets, like Amazon’s Alexa, place a (robotic) native speaker right in the centre of your home.

Swayed by the temptingly low price on the entry-level Amazon Dot, I’ve been getting to know Alexa for the past few months. First off, it’s a cliché, but this is definitely the kind of gadget you ‘never knew you needed’. After eyeing the unit with some cynicism for the first few weeks, soon I was constantly asking it to play music, convert currencies and measurements, tell me the weather forecast or simply the time. It’s both easy and fun, and gives you that sense of the future is now!

You digital language assistant

But it’s not just about voice-activating mundane, daily tasks. Ever alert to new learning opportunities, changing Alexa’s language settings was top of the list of experiments to try. And it works a treat, especially for pronunciation; suddenly, I was having to focus intently on expressing my commands in a nice, clear German accent so that Alexa could understand. (Incidentally, I’ve also found switching the language of Apple’s assistant Siri has these great pronunciation drill benefits!)

Interacting is as simple as asking a question like “”Alexa, was sind die Nachrichten?” (Alexa, what’s the news?) or “Alexa, wie ist das Wetter heute?” (Alexa, what’s the weather like today?). For more capabilities – including lots of silly (but briefly entertaining) games – there are hundreds of extra installable skills on Amazon. A useful hit list of the most useful can be found here.

The only snag with Alexa is that it is currently only available in English or German. Great news for Germanists, who won’t feel underrepresented in the language learning world for a change; but a pretty large black hole for everyone else.

Skilling up Alexa as language tutor

However, all is not lost. Users can still download Alexa Skills from Amazon, which augment the device’s capabilities. Already there are a good number of language learning skills, although they vary greatly in quality. It’s clearly early days for the device in terms of educational skills, but the start is promising.

A simple search on Learn Spanish or similar will yield plenty of results for you to try out. Here are a couple of links for the more mainstream languages:

Feedback ranges from decent right down to downright terrible on some of the skills available. However, the facility to give feedback on Amazon is a route for users to shape and improve Alexa as a language learning tool. Try new skills out, and write an honest review for each one – your thoughts will help developers to tweak and adapt Alexa skills for an incrementally better experience.

Watch this space

In summary, Alexa is an excellent investment for Germanists, but hit and miss for students of other languages – at least for the time being. There is a sizeable clamour around Spanish support on Amazon’s developer space, with pressure for other languages too. It would only seem a matter of time before she becomes more than just bilingual.

Polyglossic

Love Learning Languages

Tag: artificial intelligence

AI for Language Learners – Book Now Available!