Using ChatGPT for Learning Languages 10 Best Practices

Are you interested in using ChatGPT for learning languages, such as English, Persian, French, etc.? In this article, we’ll show you 10 best practices for using artificial intelligence individually without any human interaction to learn and practice second languages.

Watch this video on using ChatGPT for learning languages

What is ChatGPT?

If you have seen the science-fiction movie, Her, you will get the main idea of what ChatGPT actually is. In this futuristic film, the protagonist, Theodore, interacts and even falls in love with his new operating system, Samantha, installed on his PC. He can ask it or Her, which is in fact an advanced version of Microsoft Cortana, almost any question as a digital or personal assistant.

In the world of metaverse as the next generation of the internet, second language acquisition has gone through a paradigm shift. These days, language learning has become more enjoyable and interactive, thanks to the use of multimedia and the internet. ChatGPT is a conversational model between a user as a human and an assistant as a robot based on artificial intelligence or AI on the internet, which according to OpenAI, has the following four major characteristics:

1. answering follow-up questions
2. admitting mistakes and errors
3. challenging incorrect premises
4. rejecting inappropriate requests

Why use ChatGPT for learning languages?

In fact, this is a very simple question whose answer is completely clear. Let’s challenge this question by asking Why not? ChatGPT is accessible on Google Bard, Bing AI, OpenAI, etc., and it is totally free. Since you are communicating with a robot, you can enter as many prompts as you want in the chat box. The machine is tireless, so it will not get tired of responding to you.

Communication with ChatGPT is almost instantaneous. Unlike ordinary web forums where you create a topic and post your questions in order to receive relevant answers with delay, with ChatGPT, it only takes a couple of seconds to get your responses from the machine.

Practicing the 4 skills naturally and interactively with ChatGPT

Skill integration is an important aspect of second language acquisition and it means that a successful and good language learner should practice all the 4 skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing naturally, interactively and even simultaneously.

Practice writing with ChatGPT

Since you are chatting with a machine in a conversation by entering a prompt and possibly engaging in conversation through follow-up questions, you have this chance to improve your writing skills automatically. Just bear in mind that the robot does not get tired and is ready to respond to your prompts almost unlimitedly.

I’ve been using Google Bard for a while, asking it so many English questions especially about grammar, collocations, punctuation marks and the like. Being a robust language model system based on artificial intelligence, Google Bard has turned out to be extremely efficient in solving language-related questions.

To give you a hint, before the arrival of ChatGPT, sometimes I used to use Grammarly to make certain about the accurate form of my articles and writings. However, nowadays Google Bard as my personal assistant, language partner, and sometimes counselor, has literally made me independent of Grammarly and even dictionaries.

Practice reading with ChatGPT

When your prompts are input to ChatGPT, it processes them and then generates responses in standard English or other languages depending on the input. Then you can practice reading comprehension by studying the provided responses. Remember you can always ask for clarification or further information until you are satisfied.

It is interesting to add that you can give a reading passage to ChatGPT and ask the machine to generate some multiple-choice questions based on the passage. This method can help you tremendously to test your reading comprehension ability or competency.

Practice listening with ChatGPT

Thanks to its built-in text-to-speech functionality, you can opt for listening to the provided responses from ChatGPT instead of reading them. Interestingly, ChatGPT voice is incredibly human-like, and you don’t actually realize that you’re interacting with a machine. Additionally, you can install Read Aloud Google Chrome extension to convert any selected text on a webpage into speech.

Practice speaking with ChatGPT

You can always use your microphone to speak with ChatGPT instead of typing the written prompts. On OpenAI, You can practice role plays with the robot on a variety of interesting scenarios and topics. In addition, you can discuss topics of your interest with the machine in a naturally two-sided mode.

Furthermore, ChatGPT can correct your mispronunciations. However, it is not perfect and might not be able to detect and correct all of your mispronunciations. In fact, if you speak clearly and slowly, the machine may be capable of correcting most of your mispronunciations.

Practice essay writing with ChatGPT

If you’re an IELTS candidate and need to improve your writings skills, ChatGPT as a language model can come in handy. To be more precise, you can input an essay topic together with your written essay with some other relevant information in the chat box and wait for its assessment in almost no time.

Fortunately, on the new AI-powered Bing, the maximum number of allowed words is 2000, which is enough for you to include both the essay question and the full essay model. Nevertheless, please note that you shall not raise your expectations too high as the machine might not be able to assess your entire essay holistically.

For instance, I gave the machine an essay topic and its corresponding essay, but ChatGPT was not able to detect all grammar mistakes or make an assessment of the task achievement criterion. For this particular reason, we strongly recommend LELB Society’s members and students submit their IELTS essays to us for in-depth analysis and assessment. It is noteworthy to mention that we’ve analyzed over 240 IELTS essays and reports submitted to us by our students so far.

Translating words and phrases from source to target language

Like Google Translate based on machine translation, ChatGPT, too, can help you translate words, phrases, sentences or even longer text from a source language to the target one. This auto-generated text or translation can come in handy when you need to focus on the accurate grammar system of the target language. However, you should note that if the given text happens to be too technical or rather long, then the auto-translated text might not be accurate.

ChatGPT can be your language partner

Although the current world population is 8.1 billion, ironically it’s not easy to find reliable language partners these days, a language partner or even a teacher that or who is always ready to help or coach you in language learning unconditionally and without any expectations. If you’ve seen the animated movie, Mary and Max, you will understand what I’m talking about because in this dramatic movie, we learn that communicating with people even in the most densely populated areas like New York has become difficult.

Finding a language partner gets even more difficult if you happen to be shy, reserved or introverted. If that is the case, you don’t really need to be worried about this particular aspect of your personality. This is because ChatGPT does not analyze or criticize you and is constantly ready to assist you or even moderate your shyness.

Using some Google Chrome extensions for second language learning

Be an open-minded student and don’t think that ChatGPT will satisfy all of your academic needs. In addition to using ChatGPT for learning languages, we strongly recommend our English and Persian students install these 10 best Google Chrome extensions for a better educational experience. Although there are so many other Chrome extensions on Chrome Web Store, we believe our students can take full advantage of these ones.

What LELB Society has to offer beyond ChatGPT?

The effectiveness of ChatGPT is undeniable, particularly in the realm of second language learning. However, it is important to note that we, humans, are social creatures. Therefore, we actually need to interact with the people of our own ilk. In this part of the article, I’m going to elaborate on how LELB Society can be of great use to you, which is not possible through human-robot interaction.

Use multimedia in language learning

As mentioned earlier, using ChatGPT for language learning is technically limited to chatting through text. So, what you can see or experience is just words, sentences and paragraphs that are automatically generated. This text-based communication lacks multimedia, such as images, videos, podcasts, and so forth. Conversely, in our bilingual academy of English and Persian, using multimedia for language learning has always been centralized.

LELB Society is not just for language learners

There are currently over 20 authors, teachers, contributors, and marketers at LELB Society teaching and feeding over 270 members and students. These statistics prove that our bilingual academy, which sounds like a wiki for language learners on the basis of content-based instruction, is in fact a multi-authorship website.

At LELB Society, teachers, bloggers, educators, authors, and even website developers and designers can submit and publish their articles and posts in their own names. Apart from using ChatGPT for learning languages, we also use this AI-driven software program to optimize our published posts and articles to get them indexed in popular search engines, like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and so forth.

Genuine human interaction

It is undeniable that using ChatGPT for learning languages is so fun and helpful. Nevertheless, this type of using technology in education lacks real human interaction and is solely based on individualization. As a result, when the excitement of communicating with a heartless machine goes down, you might be more willing to interact with real language partners, as well.

Best practices for asynchronous learning

As mentioned earlier, using ChatGPT for learning languages occurs instantaneously. It means that your interaction with robots is just limited to hear and now. On the other hand, at LELB Society, English and Persian students can access over 4200 lessons with videos, podcasts, and interactive comment forms and forums. Our students can ask us their questions and expect to receive our detailed responses asynchronously.

The stream of academic activities in the form of published comments, replies, topics in forums, posts and articles are archived in our students’ profiles based on portfolio assessment and gamification in education. As a result, after a while, the students have this chance to track their own academic progress in our bilingual academy of English and Persian.