How I'm using AI to turbocharge my language learning
And why you should too!
Howdy and welcome to Traipsing About!
In recent months, I’ve dug into how AI can help me learn languages faster. In summary: it provides a powerful boost…and also (sadly) still requires consistently sitting down to study—no brain chips yet!
For any serious language learner, not using AI means you’re probably wasting time. Read on to learn how I’ve incorporated it into my learning work flow!
How I’m learning languages
My current language approach centers on Anki, a smart open-source flashcard program used by many polyglots or students. I’ve written at length about setting up Anki and the results after two years. (Tldr; I’ve learned Italian and Spanish to conversational fluency and am now tackling Portuguese.)
Each day, I spend 10 minutes reviewing old Anki cards and learning new concepts if I have time. Anything I learn goes in there:
Learning from live lessons. (I use iTalki to find affordable online tutors.)
Sentences I highlight when I’m reading foreign language books on my Kindle.
Pertinent language-related information I find online.
Anything I generate using the AI techniques from below.
How I’m using AI to turbocharge my language learning
Using AI dramatically speeds up my process for adding custom-tailored concepts to my learning flow. It also means that I’m seeking out and inputting new information into Anki that would have taken too long to create/import in the past.
This means I can easily attack weak spots, dialing my learning in specifically for my needs.
The result? I’ve noticeably decreased my errors with certain grammatical concepts (e.g. with “por” and “para” in Spanish) and tackled compound verb tenses that I’d ignored before, such as pluperfect or subjunctive.
Try THAT with Duolingo, which seems to teach only random phrases like “I saw the purple elephants.” There’s a reason I stopped using it years ago.
Anyway, here are ways I’m using AI (ChatGPT, Claude or Deepseek) to learn languages. Example prompts are below the list.
Having quick conversations with a speaking/listening chatbot called LanguaTalk. It feels like talking out loud to a real person and can even correct grammar.
Caveat: Having a live teacher is still important. For example, LanguaTalk’s “slang” setting taught me phrases that my teacher said carried Mexican gangster vibes. That’s not (currently) my goal!Creating example sentences – Generate sentences with specific words. E.G. “Create a list of 20 example sentences with ser and estar.”
Checking my homework – I paste sentences or upload PDFs that my Spanish teacher assigned without having to bother him.
Asking for common idioms or discovering common word pairings.
Asking for lists of words (e.g. body parts, fruit, countries, specific vocab like medical or a sport, etc).
Grammatical study – Asking for common mistakes for a certain language level and creating flashcards of those.
Vocab frequency lists – Especially for starting a new language, this is great. E.g. “List the 100 most common Spanish verbs.” (Take it to the next level by getting those with example sentences.)
Ideas I read about in the very useful course at The Universe of Memory, but haven’t tried yet:
Simple texts for reading – Generate beginner-friendly reading materials.
Tonic accent identification – Find stress patterns in sentences (I haven’t needed this for Romantic languages, but can see it being useful in, say, Asian languages.)
Job interview prep – Generate tailored interview questions and answers.
Language exam prep – Need to take a language test for citizenship or a job? Amazing.
Music discovery – Find songs in your target language.
With all of these concepts, I’ve customized and turbocharged my learning in a way that simply wasn’t possible before. While I’m still skeptical about many aspects of AI, this is certainly one of the positive uses!
Example prompts for your AI
After typing any of these into ChatGPT or whatever, I scan the results for quality control and then add “generate flashcards and export to CSV file,” then upload that to Anki:
1. List the 50 most important [whatever thing…e.g. “countries] according to experts, then create example sentences with the front in English and the back in [your target language, e.g. Spanish].
2. Create a list of irregular verbs in [ target language] with example sentences.
3. List common mistakes that intermediate-advanced [target language] learners make with example sentences.
4. More complex: Taking my highlights from reading I do on my Kindle, pasting into ChatGPT/etc and creating Anki cards with that. You’ll need to identify the target word(s) somehow, such as with quotes around what you want to learn. Example: “He visto” esa película varias veces so that the AI knows which words you want to learn.
Prompt to type:
IMPORTANT: This is the most important instruction to generate the flashcards. You need to follow exactly this format. The input sentence is a [target language] sentence. Translate and replace the target word with the English word and use that as the question.
The answer must be the [target language] word.
Example:
Input sentence example: “He visto” esa película varias veces.
Flashcard Question: (I saw) esa película varias veces.
Flashcard Answer: he visto
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Note: After I import the cards into Anki, I add mass-add audio to them using the plugin HyperTTS.
That’s all for now! Happy language learning, y’all.