Can ChatGPT actually help you learn a language? I was really hoping that the answer would be yes since that would be an amazing way to get writing practice and corrections.
The answer is a bit more complicated though, a bit yes and a bit no. So here are some screenshots that explain what I think ChatGPT can and can’t help you with.
You Will Need to Ask ChatGPT Over & Over to Correct You
I guess what I really wanted was to tell ChatGPT to do something throughout our conversation and for it to remember without me having to constantly remind it. I thought that was what artificial intelligence would be good at!
That wasn’t the case though, since I said “I would like to practice my French. Can you correct me?”
It agreed right away, so I decided to test it and sent an answer that I knew was wrong. “J’ai americaine” I have American instead of “Je suis americaine” I am American.
It didn’t correct me, it just said that it understood what I meant. I mean, I guess it kind of corrected me, but not in the way I wanted. Since saying “Vous êtes americaine” doesn’t really tell me the correct answer.
Maybe that’s nit-picky but even when I made it more obvious and said “correct everything I say” it wouldn’t do it unless prompted.
It Gets Answers Wrong & Then Apologizes When You Call It Out
This conversation is completely in French, but I asked ChatGPT to make me a quiz and it told me to make a sentence using “passé composé” and I answered correctly. Then ChatGPT said, “Almost perfect!” and explained what I did wrong, except that it repeated the exact answer I just gave it as the right answer.
I said “je ne comprends pas” or “I don’t understand” and it explained how to conjugate using “to have” in French, but if you look at the explanation, they say “in your example, “I had a conversation with a friend yesterday” it is conjugated in past participle. The correct answer is “I had a conversation with a friend yesterday.”
I thought I was losing my mind there for a minute and re-read my sentence over and over before saying, “Isn’t that the same thing I said?” And ChatGPT then apologized and said I was right lol.
Have You Used ChatGPT to Learn a Language?
Let me know in the comments if you have used it and found it helpful. I tried LangAI and found that better, but you have to pay and it was really hard to figure out how to cancel after I paid. Have you found anything better that’s free?
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Dayna Brockbank is a travel and language-learning blogger who has lived around the world but has now settled in Nice, France. She speaks 3 languages at varying levels of fluency: Spanish, Italian, and French, and graduated with a Bachelor’s in Spanish Education. She and her husband focus on making travel part of life by living cheaply and traveling on a budget.