Boosting Language-Learning with ChatGPT: Have it write you stories.
If you’ve ever gotten frustrated with the extent of the resources you have available to you for learning the language of your choice — especially an elusive minority language like Irish, Welsh, or Zulu — ChatGPT can come to the rescue in some pretty fun and interesting ways.
Sometimes you just want to feel secure in wrapping up a section of vocabulary, like “words pertaining to football”, or “verbs I could use to describe a painting”. This way you could at least have a conversation with a native speaker in that language about a specific topic, without constantly running to Google Translate to fill in the blanks.
Here’s how to use ChatGPT to generate beginner-level stories that help you practice the vocabulary that you want to focus on.
Why I developed this method
I started my Irish-learning journey roughly 6 months ago and I began by trickling in daily Duolingo and Rosetta Stone lessons. Here’s what Duolingo taught me (lol).
Then, realizing I was getting nowhere fast, I engaged a brilliant tutor on iTalki, attended Scoile Scairte, listened to Barrscealta on RTE.ie at least once a day for at least 30 minutes, and booked a trip to Ireland to visit Creeslough to honor my grandmother, Kay McNulty.
I would love to say that as a result of having been to Ireland, I advanced my Irish considerably. Unfortunately, as many Irish people will attest, since this was not a targeted immersion trip to the Gaeltacht, very few of my interactions in Irish were with Irish speakers, and most of my novel Irish words came from plaques, museum pamphlets, and road signs, such as the common word “teampeall” which you can see written on roundabouts.
Coming home from Ireland, I resolved to create for myself my own home Gaeltacht cobbled together from as many immersive and learning resources as possible. That means surrounding myself with Irish, keeping myself in my local introductory Irish group classes (even though I’m not strictly a beginner anymore) just to maintain regular exposure, and getting as much reading in as possible. (Oh and I have the best 1–1 immersion Irish teacher ever on iTalki, but I can’t do that every day.)
The big gap in my learning of the language at this point lies in structured vocabulary building. And there are websites like Memrise that could probably help with that, but frankly, I hate flashcards with a passion and Memrise isn’t much better. And while Duolingo is great for introducing new vocabulary, it does so in a way that you don’t really get to choose what words you learn or in which order.
Personally, I want to feel as though I am getting “complete sets” of vocabulary so that I can complete “chapters” of the language.
I’ve now realized ChatGPT is perfectly positioned to be asked questions that will generate actionable “chapters” for language learning in the form of funny little short stories.
How to get ChatGPT to write you beginner-level stories to teach you new vocabulary words.
To start, I decided to find out where my lowest-level weaknesses were by inspecting a list of 200 most-used words and see what I didn’t know yet. To my gratification, ChatGPT’s list had just a cupla focal I didn’t yet have a firm grasp on: “ceachtar”, “suas”, “síos”, “thiar”, “trid”, “taobh”.
OK, so those are mostly connecting words and directions. I need some nouns and actions to play with too.
So with those in hand, I’m picking a category of vocabulary out of the air: barnyard animals.
I already know a lot of these words, but not all, so having a list of nouns where only a few holes in my vocabulary exist is perfect.
Now, I wanted to start addressing my biggest weakness: verbs.
ChatGPT did an excellent job with the following prompt:
Nice! There’s a lot to learn from in there. I especially like to see stuff like “the spider climbs up,” because in Irish, you can’t just say “up”, you have to be more precise with directions and say “from down, going up”. I’ll need to practice those a lot.
OK great, but just reading sentences is going to get boring. Let’s turn this into a story!
Oh but first, let’s make sure ChatGPT knows we’re trying to practice directionality in Irish by asking for its most common direction words.
Awesome, now let’s pull it all together and have ChatGPT generate a story using very basic vocabulary of a type that I specifically want to learn right now.
Success! And I can just keep on hitting the “Regenerate Response” button to get a fresh story using the exact same bank of vocab words.
You can see how you could use this exact sequence of requests to generate stories for whatever language you are trying to learn, no?
If you have any tips on how to use ChatGPT for language, let me know in the comments!
