Another week, another update!

I was struggling a little bit as to what resources I could use to improve my learning of German. And then the idea dawned on me as I was working on an environmental biology assignment. This particular assignment required me to utilize ChatGPT to create a one page essay rough draft, which I would then refine into a workable paper. With AI becoming fairly prominent in modern culture, I thought it would be an interesting opportunity to see what it could produce.

I first asked for German learning sites. The results provided some stuff I’ve heard about, such as Duolingo, Babbel, LingoDeer and Rosetta Stone. However, it also provided other resources that I never heard of before, such as Deutsche Welle, FluentU, Memrise, and the Goethe Institut. I have chosen the latter two to dive into in the weeks to come, so stay tuned for that!

Once I scouted those resources, I was curious as to ChatGPT’s capabilities in language and how it can help me learn. I asked if it spoke German in German, and it responded in German! Same with French. I’m sure it would have continued to speak in German had I known more questions in German to pose.

I then asked it to teach me German. I knew it was going to give me broad strokes, but I took it on as if I was a complete beginner, with no prior knowledge or experience. I then went through the various aspects of the language itself, such as verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs, and even sentence structure. It did a fairly good job at explaining the different concepts.

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It was at that point, I wanted an easy way to learn about colours. One of the tips ChatGPT gave was to learn the colours through songs and rhymes. I completely forgot that form of mnemonic, as I didn’t utilize it all that much. I then asked to give me a song or rhyme and it produced this:

When I spoke the rhyme out loud, it made so much sense. It was such a fun little rhyme too, nothing too complicated. I’ll continue to remember it for a long while.

I’m still unsure of AI as a whole, but this experience was a positive one. I wouldn’t recommend people to use AI as a crutch to learn a language. However, I think AI can be used as a tool and can be helpful in little instances, especially coming up with mnumonics and resources.

What are your thoughts on AI and learning languages? Or using AI as an introduction to a new subject? Share in the comments below!