Welcome back to the Learn English podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
On today's episode, we're going to discuss one of the newest and I think most exciting things that you can use to learn a language, and that is ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is an AI software.
It is relatively new, but I think it is one of the most powerful tools that you can use to help you learn a language.
On today's episode, I'm going to go over how I have used it and what my recommendations are if you want to use it to help you learn English this year.
If you're interested in learning about ChatGPT and the different ways that it can help you learn English, then follow along because we're about to begin.
Before we get started, I want to remind you to look at the description of this podcast episode.
There you will find a list of the words and phrases that I used in the episode so you can build your English vocabulary.
Now, a little bit about my language learning journey.
I have been studying Spanish for a number of years, but I can always improve.
My Spanish is not perfect, and I'm always looking for different things that I can use to just better my language level overall.
With chat GPT, I have been using it to practice my Spanish and get some feedback, and so on on today's episode, I really want to talk about how I have used ChatGPT and what are some things that I've noticed overall.
The most important thing I think when you're using ChatGPT is to remember to give it as many details as possible.
ChatGPT uses a prompt system.
You type and you ask it to do a certain thing for you.
The more detail and the more specific you can get in this prompt section, the better results you're going to get out of using ChatGPT.
The more details you give, the more specific your question, the more feedback you give it, the better the results you're going to get.
Keep that in mind when you use it.
And on today's episode, I really want to go through the different ways you can customize the prompts.
Now, I think the most powerful tool with ChatGPT is to actually download the app on your phone.
You can use the website version.
I use the website version a lot.
But with the phone app, there is something called a voice chat feature.
And that I think is really exciting.
When I teach English online to my students, I hear all the time that they want to practice their speaking ability that they want to get more fluent.
But they just feel nervous, they feel scared, and maybe a little bit embarrassed to talk to someone.
People get a little bit embarrassed about their pronunciation, they don't want to make a mistake, and so they get stressed out, they get fearful, and they end up not talking as much as they should.
I've heard this a lot over the years from my students, and I think that's one of the most important things about ChatGPT.
When you use the voice chat feature, you are able to practice your speaking ability.
You're able to get feedback, but without all of the stress.
ChatGPT isn't a person.
It's not judging you.
It's a piece of software.
There's no reason to ever get embarrassed or to ever be nervous when you are speaking to it.
There's no reason to fear making a mistake.
There is no judgment.
There's no embarrassment.
It is just a low stress way to practice your speaking.
I think that this is one of the best features of ChatGPT and it is the most highly recommended thing I can think of that you can do with ChatGPT.
Now, like I said, you really need to focus on the prompts.
What I do and what I recommend you do is that you go on ChatGPT and you tell it that you want to practice your speaking ability.
Tell it that you want to have a conversation and that you want to learn a specific type of whatever language you are learning.
If you are learning English, which I assume you are if you're listening to this podcast, then you want to say what type of English, what dialect of English you want to learn.
Do you want to learn American English, Scottish English, South African English.
Those are all very different and you want to be specific so you can get it to customize the conversation and you can learn the type of English that you are trying to learn.
Then you can also put in there how much corrections you want it to give you.
What I normally do is that I ask it to help me correct my grammar and give me ideas if I am struggling to say what I want to say.
If I'm having difficulty articulating my thoughts, which means expressing my thoughts or expressing myself in a way that makes sense, then I want to ask it for help.
What I do is I ask it to correct any grammatical mistakes that I make during the conversation.
I ask it to just give me major mistake corrections, not every single little thing.
I noticed that if you ask ChatGPT to correct every single thing that you say, it can make the conversation go pretty slow.
You will say something and then it'll correct you And it's really hard to have a natural conversation when every single word that you're saying is getting corrected.
So instead, I ask it to have a conversation with me and give me major mistake corrections and help me correct any grammatical problems or grammatical mistakes that I'm making.
That helps it have a conversation with me and also correct me while still keeping the conversation moving forward.
If you're someone who really wants every single thing to be corrected you can do that but like I said I don't think that's the best.
When I am having a conversation with it and when I am struggling to say something I will ask it how do you explain this thought or how can I say this particular thing to sound more natural.
roll. That way I can get specific feedback for a certain thing that I want corrected, but I don't need to get stopped and corrected every single word that I say.
I really think that is the highest value thing that you can do with ChatGPT.
I think that's going to help you get the most out of your usage of the app and really get a lot of speaking practice in, which is important if you are trying to speak fluently, if you're trying to improve your speaking abilities.
Now besides practicing your speaking, you can also practice your writing.
I've had a number of students say that they need to write an email for work or they need to type something up for their boss and they're a little bit nervous about their writing.
If you have to do this, if you need to compose an email or a letter or you're just unsure about a piece of writing, what you can do is you can ask chat GPT to correct it.
If you're going to do this, the keys for the prompt I think are that again you need to say what type of English you want it to use and the particular tone you want.
So if you are trying to learn American English and specifically business English, put that in the prompt.
Say that you want this to be in American English, that you want this to be a business email so you want it to have a relatively professional tone.
That way when it corrects you it will take out anything that might be too informal and help you say whatever it is that you're trying to express in a more formal tone.
Now of course if you're writing something to a friend you don't want to put that in your prompt.
You want to say that this is a message to a friend So you want to be careful and, again, really be specific with whatever style, whatever tone, whatever dialect of English that you want this to be.
When I submit my piece of writing for chat GPT to correct, what I do is I put my information in the prompt, and then I put quotes around my particular piece of writing.
That way it separates the thing that you're asking it to do from the actual sample of writing that you are submitting into the website or onto the app.
When it reads your writing, it will then give you any feedback and you can decide how you want to change it.
If you want to take its corrections or maybe if you wanted to explain why it corrected a particular thing.
The other thing that I use ChatGPT for is a more specific Google search.
When you are trying to learn a language, you should be reading and listening to that language as much as possible.
We have done many episodes on the input hypothesis.
I have talked about this concept a lot on this channel, but I really think it's important that you try to get as much contact with the language as possible.
When you do that, though, you're going to come across words or sayings that you just don't understand.
Maybe you understand the general idea, but you don't know specifically what that means.
or maybe you have no idea what this particular word or saying means.
What you can do is, of course, you can look in Google and just get a basic definition.
But with ChatGPT, you can do so much more.
You can ask it to give you the definition of a particular word or phrase.
You can also ask it to explain the meaning of the entire sentence.
And then you can ask it more questions if you're still struggling to understand.
let's say that it gives you the definition but you still don't quite understand why the author used that particular word or saying in the sentence you can keep asking it questions until you better understand or you can ask it for more examples i do this all the time i will ask it for the definition of a particular
word and then once i feel comfortable with that definition i will ask it to generate multiple sentences with that word in it.
That way you can see multiple examples of how that word is used in a sentence so you can kind of get a better idea of how to correctly use it if you want to use it yourself.
Then the next step is to actually use the word in a sentence and then ask ChatGPT if you used it correctly.
Ask it if it sounds natural and submit your sentence and see what it says, see what feedback it gives you.
It might say that that is a perfect use of the word, or it might ask you to change something, maybe change the grammar if you used it incorrectly, and just give you a little bit more feedback.
That way you can get some practice in and really take your learning to the next level.
The stuff that you can't do with just a basic Google search, and that's really one of the interesting things that you can do with ChatGPT, you can really take it to that next level so you can get more practice in and start using it yourself.
And that leads me to my last thing that I have used ChatGPT for, and that is practice problems.
Just like vocabulary words, if there is a particular grammatical structure that you don't understand, you can have ChatGPT explain the concept to you.
It can give you a basic definition, a basic overview of your grammatical structure.
But after that, it can give you example sentences with that particular grammatical structure and then you can ask it to generate a list of practice problems with that particular grammatical structure.
I have done this with the subjunctive in Spanish.
I asked ChachiPT to generate me a list of 10 practice problems and then I went through the practice problems with ChachiBT.
I would answer the questions and then I would ask for its feedback.
This was really cool because it felt like almost having someone there walking through the problems with me.
I know a lot of people do worksheets and practice problems when they are studying a language, but usually you do this on your own.
Unless you're taking a class with someone, you usually do these practice problems on your own.
And so it can be a little bit confusing if you don't understand the correct answer.
And that's really what's great with Chat GPT.
You can use it to generate practice problems and walk through the answers with you.
Or you can even take answers from a worksheet that you don't understand and ask Chat GPT to explain the answer to you.
This is really good for getting that feedback, for getting practice in, and for eventually mastering whatever grammatical structure it is that you're currently struggling with.
Now a couple of things about using ChatGPT that I just want to point out.
I know I've talked a lot about how I have used it and why I think it's a really good resource but there are just some things to remember.
The first thing is that it is not a real person so it really is limited in its database knowledge and also with what you ask it to do and sometimes just like with any other software there can be some problems or some bugs in the system.
I talked about this before when I did the episode on free language learning resources.
I mentioned ChatGPT then.
I still think it is a great free resource but there are some things that I've noticed along the way.
The first is that a couple of times when I was talking to it, when I was practicing my Spanish, it switched languages.
It started talking in a completely different language and I don't know why.
That was really confusing because I don't speak any other language and I didn't ask it to start speaking a different language.
It just did that on its own.
Of course, once I realized that, it was pretty quick to fix that.
But just know that there can be some glitches along the way.
The other thing is that if you are using it to come up with practice problems, these are usually kind of repetitive after a while.
I've noticed that about 10 to 20 problems is the max that you want to do with chat GPT.
After that, you kind of just start seeing this same type of question over and over again.
There's not very much variety like there would be if you were with an actual person.
So I think it's great for doing practice problems, but I would say limit it to about 10 or 20 because after that, you're probably not going to get as much benefit from it.
And the last thing is that chat GPT really is not going to get offended by you, so it's okay if you want it to do something else.
I think that this is important when you are using the chat feature or if you're trying to do a text conversation with chat GPT.
Sometimes it'll ask you questions, it will try to take the conversation in one direction and if you want to, you can just completely ignore what it's saying.
So sometimes it might ask you maybe how your day was and if you don't want to talk about that but you want to talk about a certain sporting event instead, just start talking about whatever it is that you want to discuss.
Start talking about that sporting event or any other topic and it will forget about the question that it originally asked you.
It will respond to what you said and it doesn't get offended.
It doesn't think you're rude.
So you really can customize it to whatever it is that you need out of it.
You can talk about whatever you want.
You can use it for whatever you need.
And that's really where I think the strength of ChatGPT is.
There is so much customization, and that is not something that you usually get with a free resource.
And that's why I highly recommend using it.
So I hope you found this episode interesting.
I hope you got some inspiration.
If you haven't used ChatGPT in the past to log in, to try to do some practice prompts and just see what happens.
But I really, really do think that it's an amazing language learning tool once you get the hang of using it.
Which means once you get used to it, once you practice a little bit, it gets easier and there's really a lot that you can do with it.
Also, if you have used ChatGPT and you use it in a way that's different from what I said here, please let me know.
I would love to learn more about how people are using it to learn a language because like I said, I think it's a really great resource.
If you're enjoying the podcast overall, if it's helping you with your English abilities, then please consider leaving us a rating on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast on.
You can also tell a friend or a family member who's learning English so we can continue to grow our audience.
You can follow us on social media at Learn English Pod.
The website is learningenglishpod .com.
And remember to like and subscribe so you don't miss our next episode when it comes out next week.
Until then, keep learning English.
