This is really awesome! One thing to note about Duolingo is that the people with a 1000 day streak probably only spend 3 minutes a day on the app, so only 50 hours over the course of 3 years. In sheer volume you're getting more in a month than the average Duolingo user gets in a year. That's the fundamental lie of the bird though; that you can actually learn a language in 3 minutes a day by playing a silly little game. This is still a big time commitment but much better return than if you were to play the Duolingo game for an equal amount of time.
Great tip! I found it useful to just sit down and straight memorize all conjunctions and prepositions right from the start, or close enough to the start—as soon as I figured out how the language was supposed to sound/be pronounced. There arent very many of them, comparatively, in any language, and theyre super useful. You could probably get the AI to prioritize these in the initial stories.
just played around with this yesterday, great tip thank you! very smart to memorize those from the start as they're hard to guess from context too. The AI can absolutely prioritize these, i found this very helpful. thanks for commenting!
So when I was 6 years old I moved to the US from Mexico without knowing a single word of english. I was eventually moved to a bilingual school somewhere in Houston where they taught classes in english and spanish. The way they had me learn english though wasnt by doing grammar exercises endlessly but by sitting me with another 4 kids who also didn't know much english and having us read stories out loud while correcting or helping us with pronounciation.
I shit you not I went from knowing nothing at all to speaking fluently within a year. In all fairness I was a kid and that makes things easier but I think your method is very similar to the way I learned, only that you replaced middle-aged teachers with AI.
I might actually try this with chinese because I think your method is better than doing Duolingo for 3 years straight. If I have any critiques though it would be that maybe the stories you are generating should be longer than a simple conversation, maybe a story that's like a paragraph long would be better but since it's AI I'm sure there is no issue.
The speaking part seems the hardest because without anyone correcting you, you'll just butcher whatever you are saying; like in english if you're trying to say "snake" you might try saying it as "esnake" like a lot spanish speakers do. My advice is maybe try speaking into a speech to text app and see if it recognizes what you're saying but I doc think you might need a teacher for this part.
Anyways sorry for the wall of text thanks for the guide I'll report any progress I make.
that's awesome sage, thank you for sharing this. super inspiring. i understand that being a kid helps with language but tbh i refuse to believe that it's impossible to get pretty damn good as an adult. even with accents and such.
definitely try deepseek with chinese! the stories are about 2min long when read aloud, so a couple paragraphs usually and enough to be able to add ~50 new words to the vocab list after 1-2 stories :)
speaking will be harder for sure, but that's june's problem lolol, for now just comprehension. i tried the speech to text thing you mentioned and it thought i was speaking german fml
please do report the progress if you think of it!! thanks for your comment~
I’ve learned two languages besides English since I was 15 and I agree with you. What kids have is people talking to them like they are babies and letting them respond like they are toddlers etc. I have been lucky enough to have the free time to listen to people and gifted with shamelessness to talk like a child while I learn. Kids don’t master their native language in a year, it takes them like six years of input and exchange with a world patient communicators. I find that as adults If you can get into environments where people will talk to you even though you don’t understand everything and keep talking to you as you speak with mistakes, it also takes about six years. You will never be native, but you can be perfectly fluent. What’s hardest is finding the patient communicators and full transparency, I’ve done that through romantic relationships. But… people are using ChatGPT to simulate those as well, so maybe we can use it to simulate language parents in all sorts of ways.
Maybe we can prompt chat gpt to interact with us in the target language as if we had the comprehension of a two year old. I’ll try that when I start paying for ChatGPT.
This is awesome. I’m a language nerd and brute force italian and spanish with anki, but took years to do it the lazy way. This seems super efficient, and natural.
Hugely agree people are sleeping on LLM’s potential for language learning. It’s fucking what it’s made for, not make AI gooner bait art.
Gotta think about how i’d use it for Japanese, but it should work too! Thanks for this post!
This method would def work for Japanese, I just tested it and the accent/voice is pretty natural and the grammar is all in working order. Perhaps DeepSeek would be even better.
You can also ask it to write fully in hiragana, and ask it to only include really easy kanji. It can also write in "furigana", except it just puts a bit of hiragana after the word in parentheses like this: 先週（せんしゅう）の土曜日（どようび）、友達（ともだち）と一緒（いっしょ）に京都（きょうと）に行（い）きました。
It messes with the read aloud a *little bit* but really not much tbh. I'm surprised. It reads natural enough with the "furigana"
So as long as you got a handle on at least Hiragana, you should be able to work up from there! Ganbatte ne~!
And again, sorry to keep spamming lol, but just tried with Japanese. It works well! I uploaded a csv containing most common 1k words, and it's using that as it's source material for the short stories.
feeding it a csv with the most common 1k words is such a cracked idea, bravo!! Thanks for the updates on this, may your learning be swift--I'll have to look into making an Anki deck for Dutch this way
As someone who has struggled to learn foreign languages in traditional and less traditional settings, I'm intrigued.
I have a small quibble/question though. Dutch is the one language I've had relative success with, partially due to some immersion. But it's also the closest language to English (with the exception of Frisian—regional language in the northern Netherlands), so I'm wondering how much that factor contributed to the speed of success in this experiment. Have you tried a non-Germanic language for comparison?
thank you for your comment Meg! I’d agree, I’ve read sources that say Dutch is actually the easiest language for native English speakers to learn, perhaps Frisian is easier as you said—I’m sure this was a factor. That being said I’ve dabbled with it for Japanese as well which I already know a bit of, and it seems very fast as well! Perhaps a bit slower and ofc alphabet stuff can be a bit of upfront time, but I think this method definitely has legs. Will try with Nepali from scratch pretty soon. Let me know if you try it!!
haha no … like everyone says, u can get by without it in the netherlands, but i find it makes life sad. i like to be kind to strangers and joke w the veggie vendor 🍎
Thank you for this recommendation! I’m ten chapters into a story based on Final Fantasy (in Japanese). Some surprisingly moving dialogue from the wolf in the forest after healing him.
Great Q sage, to manage the vocab list I just oogabooga have a long google doc. Each word on a new line. New vocab words get added to the top of the list, so they get more repetition when I go to review. If I'm reviewing and completely blank on a word, I move it to the top of the list. Basically doing spaced repetition "manually". Anki would probs work great too, but I like this method a lot so far~!
AI can straight up change your life and mfs out here complaining it'll take robotic jobs
utilize the tools in a sagelike manner (☞°ヮ°)☞ ☜(°ヮ°☜)
Vocabmaxxing LETSGOOOOO
LETSGOOOOOOO first 10, then 100,, 1000,,,, THE NUMBERS ONLY GO UPPPPPPP
This is really awesome! One thing to note about Duolingo is that the people with a 1000 day streak probably only spend 3 minutes a day on the app, so only 50 hours over the course of 3 years. In sheer volume you're getting more in a month than the average Duolingo user gets in a year. That's the fundamental lie of the bird though; that you can actually learn a language in 3 minutes a day by playing a silly little game. This is still a big time commitment but much better return than if you were to play the Duolingo game for an equal amount of time.
great point!
I’m already taking Russian at college, so I’m familiar with grammar, parlaying this could be epic win
oh 100% it would be. speedrun that shit sage
Great tip! I found it useful to just sit down and straight memorize all conjunctions and prepositions right from the start, or close enough to the start—as soon as I figured out how the language was supposed to sound/be pronounced. There arent very many of them, comparatively, in any language, and theyre super useful. You could probably get the AI to prioritize these in the initial stories.
just played around with this yesterday, great tip thank you! very smart to memorize those from the start as they're hard to guess from context too. The AI can absolutely prioritize these, i found this very helpful. thanks for commenting!
Also could probably direct it to be about a topic you want to learn about anyway.
So when I was 6 years old I moved to the US from Mexico without knowing a single word of english. I was eventually moved to a bilingual school somewhere in Houston where they taught classes in english and spanish. The way they had me learn english though wasnt by doing grammar exercises endlessly but by sitting me with another 4 kids who also didn't know much english and having us read stories out loud while correcting or helping us with pronounciation.
I shit you not I went from knowing nothing at all to speaking fluently within a year. In all fairness I was a kid and that makes things easier but I think your method is very similar to the way I learned, only that you replaced middle-aged teachers with AI.
I might actually try this with chinese because I think your method is better than doing Duolingo for 3 years straight. If I have any critiques though it would be that maybe the stories you are generating should be longer than a simple conversation, maybe a story that's like a paragraph long would be better but since it's AI I'm sure there is no issue.
The speaking part seems the hardest because without anyone correcting you, you'll just butcher whatever you are saying; like in english if you're trying to say "snake" you might try saying it as "esnake" like a lot spanish speakers do. My advice is maybe try speaking into a speech to text app and see if it recognizes what you're saying but I doc think you might need a teacher for this part.
Anyways sorry for the wall of text thanks for the guide I'll report any progress I make.
that's awesome sage, thank you for sharing this. super inspiring. i understand that being a kid helps with language but tbh i refuse to believe that it's impossible to get pretty damn good as an adult. even with accents and such.
definitely try deepseek with chinese! the stories are about 2min long when read aloud, so a couple paragraphs usually and enough to be able to add ~50 new words to the vocab list after 1-2 stories :)
speaking will be harder for sure, but that's june's problem lolol, for now just comprehension. i tried the speech to text thing you mentioned and it thought i was speaking german fml
please do report the progress if you think of it!! thanks for your comment~
I’ve learned two languages besides English since I was 15 and I agree with you. What kids have is people talking to them like they are babies and letting them respond like they are toddlers etc. I have been lucky enough to have the free time to listen to people and gifted with shamelessness to talk like a child while I learn. Kids don’t master their native language in a year, it takes them like six years of input and exchange with a world patient communicators. I find that as adults If you can get into environments where people will talk to you even though you don’t understand everything and keep talking to you as you speak with mistakes, it also takes about six years. You will never be native, but you can be perfectly fluent. What’s hardest is finding the patient communicators and full transparency, I’ve done that through romantic relationships. But… people are using ChatGPT to simulate those as well, so maybe we can use it to simulate language parents in all sorts of ways.
Maybe we can prompt chat gpt to interact with us in the target language as if we had the comprehension of a two year old. I’ll try that when I start paying for ChatGPT.
holy shit this is actually utterly goated and I’m high key mad I haven’t already been doin this
This is awesome. I’m a language nerd and brute force italian and spanish with anki, but took years to do it the lazy way. This seems super efficient, and natural.
Hugely agree people are sleeping on LLM’s potential for language learning. It’s fucking what it’s made for, not make AI gooner bait art.
Gotta think about how i’d use it for Japanese, but it should work too! Thanks for this post!
This method would def work for Japanese, I just tested it and the accent/voice is pretty natural and the grammar is all in working order. Perhaps DeepSeek would be even better.
You can also ask it to write fully in hiragana, and ask it to only include really easy kanji. It can also write in "furigana", except it just puts a bit of hiragana after the word in parentheses like this: 先週（せんしゅう）の土曜日（どようび）、友達（ともだち）と一緒（いっしょ）に京都（きょうと）に行（い）きました。
It messes with the read aloud a *little bit* but really not much tbh. I'm surprised. It reads natural enough with the "furigana"
So as long as you got a handle on at least Hiragana, you should be able to work up from there! Ganbatte ne~!
Also, if you ask Chatgpt to make an anki deck for you with the instructions, it does it! Helps out if anyone is an anki nerd and reading this.
And again, sorry to keep spamming lol, but just tried with Japanese. It works well! I uploaded a csv containing most common 1k words, and it's using that as it's source material for the short stories.
feeding it a csv with the most common 1k words is such a cracked idea, bravo!! Thanks for the updates on this, may your learning be swift--I'll have to look into making an Anki deck for Dutch this way
Keep us updated wise cuck sage
Just tried it with Portuguese! Now trying with Japanese. Preciate the advice!
As someone who has struggled to learn foreign languages in traditional and less traditional settings, I'm intrigued.
I have a small quibble/question though. Dutch is the one language I've had relative success with, partially due to some immersion. But it's also the closest language to English (with the exception of Frisian—regional language in the northern Netherlands), so I'm wondering how much that factor contributed to the speed of success in this experiment. Have you tried a non-Germanic language for comparison?
thank you for your comment Meg! I’d agree, I’ve read sources that say Dutch is actually the easiest language for native English speakers to learn, perhaps Frisian is easier as you said—I’m sure this was a factor. That being said I’ve dabbled with it for Japanese as well which I already know a bit of, and it seems very fast as well! Perhaps a bit slower and ofc alphabet stuff can be a bit of upfront time, but I think this method definitely has legs. Will try with Nepali from scratch pretty soon. Let me know if you try it!!
I’ve been stuck in Duolingo Limbo for too long with Spanish. I think I’ll give this method a try. It sounds more fun and hopefully useful.
anything to get out of duolingo hell, definitely give it a shot and I hope it works wonders for you~!
I may add that you can create podcast with Gemini (Google's AI) about any topic and using the target language
Very cool.
It doesn't know Mayan languages unfortunately, which are the ones I want to learn for the region I live in, oh well.
I'm learning Mayan writing, I have several books and materials I could share with you. Do you speak Spanish? That would be helpful
heaven sent. I’m learning Dutch too …. and Murakami is a favorite author of mine.
murakami--hell yeah; learning dutch--hell no
why are you doing that to yourself???? please don't say it's for fun??????????
haha no … like everyone says, u can get by without it in the netherlands, but i find it makes life sad. i like to be kind to strangers and joke w the veggie vendor 🍎
W, sagelike behavior. Let me know if you’re anywhere near Groningen as I’m in a small town south of there and in serious need of some friends!!
I am away for a while now, but i will remember when i’m back … wishing u the best!
Thank you for this recommendation! I’m ten chapters into a story based on Final Fantasy (in Japanese). Some surprisingly moving dialogue from the wolf in the forest after healing him.
that's what i'm saying!! it writes more than well enough to be compelling and memorable. this method is actually cracked
ez, how do you manage the vocab list? Something like anki cards or in the same AI convo?
Great Q sage, to manage the vocab list I just oogabooga have a long google doc. Each word on a new line. New vocab words get added to the top of the list, so they get more repetition when I go to review. If I'm reviewing and completely blank on a word, I move it to the top of the list. Basically doing spaced repetition "manually". Anki would probs work great too, but I like this method a lot so far~!