Jonathan Green 2024: [00:00:00] Can AI help us learn new languages even faster? With today's special guest, Kirsten Cable.
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This is a topic near and dear to my heart. Because I've tried every different method for learning the languages and some work for me, and some don't.
Some people swear by one method, others swear by another. And most people think of AI as solving the problem of translation, but can it also help us to learn a new language? I'd love to know your approach, your experience and what brought you to using AI in this way.
Kerstin: Oh gosh. So many questions.
So many thoughts. I'm curious Jonathan, tell me more about what methods you've tried before we dive into the ai.
Jonathan Green 2024: Oh, sure. I've tried everything from Pimsler method. Okay. Where you listen to a tape and say it back to immersion. I lived in my experience of what works the best for me is just living in the country.
So when I lived in Japan, my Japanese got very good. Course. Yeah. But any other method, just, it never really works for me. And it's, even now when people speak to me in Spanish, I'll respond in Japanese, so it's very hard for me. Whereas my kids are fully trilingual. They just bounce between languages all the time.
Yeah. And they're very sneaky about it. So they know when they can say, they'll switch what they're, which language they're using, depending upon who's watching them, so they can get away with being naughty. So they're very savvy and they have that advantage. That's just a big advantage. 'cause my wife, I, and then our employees speak three different languages.
So they have this really big edge, and that's my experience.
Kerstin: Oh. Oh, it's fascinating. Yeah. I think one of the, one of the. So I've been a language learning coach. I will introduce myself in a second. Hello audience. Sorry. It's just get, I get really into this topic. I'm very enthusiastic about it and one of the issues I always see is adult learners comparing themselves to little kids and feeling I cannot possibly.
Do well because you're not doing well in the way that they're doing. Like little kids are amazing linguists, as are we. And in a way, when we look at what AI does with language, it's similar to the way we could argue that it's similar to the way little kids do it. Own background.
Hello, my name's Kirsten. I have worked. As an independent language tutor and then language learning coach for over a decade. So I'm really interested in how people learn languages, particularly adults, which is so under researched in science and so underdone and I love. I love the way, I love looking at, motivation, the psychological side of language learning, but then also looking at what works.
And there is an element where we you have observed something really well, which is no method. One method works for everyone. That's like saying there's one business type that makes everybody successful. It's just not quite right. It's just not quite how it works. So the way, as an. As a solo learner, the advantage that you have and the way that you can work is to start pulling the best bits and creating your own little method.
And where we see AI coming in, I think is really fascinating, is it just gives people a way of interacting with technology for language learning in a way that I have never seen before because we've just not had natural language input. With the level of flexibility that we have now and available in as many languages as we can get now.
So when you typically think about technology for language learning, either you're thinking, like you said about something like Google Translate, that is interesting enough. It does one job, right? It does one job, and that's pretty much it. And then you have the other side, which is essentially language learning apps, and.
If I had money for every time somebody told tell tells me they tried learning a language with Duolingo and then they trail off 'cause it didn't lead anywhere, I'd be so rich because it's just not quite enough. So we want to build our own independent learning environment. And what AI does is that because it's essentially built on natural language, it gives you access.
Modifiable access to your level, to natural language interaction in hundreds of languages that you can just use and you can operate by just, expressing yourself and it's non-judgmental, which is really fantastic for most people. Like this is also why we do AB absent, that kind of thing.
It's really hard to get over this idea of, oh my God, someone's gonna see me. Performing my target language and I can't quite do it. So you've got just this space in there. Can you talk
Jonathan Green 2024: about the specific technique? 'cause maybe what I'm imagining in my head is not the same thing. Like I know that a big thing, a lot of people, certainly I lived in Japan, a lot of people pay just to spend an hour practicing conversational skills with someone.
Yes. So not with a teacher. Anyone. And you do pen pals or you do phone call pals, or not video call pals. And I realized that's one of the easy things for an AI to do, but what else are ways that people can practically use AI right now to help them with their language learning process?
Kerstin: It's interesting.
Like I would almost challenge that. That's, yes, it's an easy thing in terms of for you as the operator to get an AI to do, right? Because you literally just, you can open up chat GPT and say, talk to me in French and it'll talk to you in French. Gets boring really quickly. That's a huge problem because talking to an actual person that you get on with, I don't think is replaceable.
I don't think we want to replace that. The point of learning a language is not to interact with a computer better. The point of learning a language is to interact with another human. So your Japanese observation day is, I think they've got something very right and a big argument. And what we create with AI language club is not giving you an instruction manual for replacing the other things that are super useful in language learning, but instead the kind of things that we bring together. And I'll talk about AI language club 'cause that's where we collect all of the ideas that we have is to. For me, I've got obviously a language teaching background.
My partner is a conference interpreter like a UN EU interpreter as well. So we can bring in a lot of our own linguistic knowledge, but mix it with learning knowledge and we bring together like different learning concepts and different exercises. So you've got something self-contained and then it depends.
Really like our vision and it's going really well, is to build up this library of tutorials that you can just access, where you can try lots of different things. Something really easy that you could do that works extremely well is to, if you've got an interaction coming up, or maybe you're, say you're watching a show.
Imagine you're watching football doc, football commentary. Football, British football, so like soccer commentary. You've got matchup coming up and your vision, your like, big dream is to watch this in Portuguese and you can use the AI to generate you a vocab list. You can export that into.
Something like sheets, right? If you're using the Gemini, you can then you can tailor it to your level. You can even get images generated to go with it. So you've got your own little flashcards and they're made really quickly. And this is in minutes. You can get pronunciation aids. We've played around with song generation, lyrics, generation we've got these little.
Sort of 10, 20 minute projects. Something that our audience and our members have really loved is to use that concept that we see on Reddit a lot. Explain like I'm five and apply it and experiment with trying to apply that to a fairly complicated grammatical concept. So something you can't get your head around.
It might be the Spanish imperative for me as a Welch learner. It might be Welch Plurals or Welch numbers. It got, they're really hard. And then you just go to, you go to your chosen really client. We really chat, GPT for this. We usually recommend one client for it. And you. Try and get it explained to you as if you're five.
Try again and modify that as if you're 12, because suddenly the thing starts talking a lot less about your Superman toy and gives you different examples. You get the kind of 360 view of a concept. I would be hesitant with generating examples sometimes, so. It's not always a hundred percent reliable.
Again, you want human interaction. We're not here to replace a person as language learners, but we want to bring in like new perspective and new impulses and that creativity. And we've also do done a lot with prompting you to. To write yourself, and to do something like a listening comprehension exercise.
Sorry, that's a million examples. None of which is just [00:10:00] open it up and have a conversation because in my opinion, that's you. You really then get bored very quickly and boredom kills language learning. Yeah,
Jonathan Green 2024: that's interesting. That's why I asked the question because everyone has a different approach or a different thought about what it can do.
Most people think. Right now, oh, AI can solve all problems. That it can replace everything, that it's the right answer to every question and that's certainly what people always expect me to say is that the answer to every question is ai. And for me, it's certainly not my children. Their language learning is very much offline.
They much learn it from people and perplexing. In real life, the only language they learn from television or movies is English, because that's where they hear American accents. So other than that, and me. But my accents drifted 'cause they've been gone for so long. So that's the only place they do anything online.
Most of their learning is in person. So I just wonder about this and I think about exactly how everyone wants to learn in a different way. So for me, one of the ways I like to learn is I like to read a book where it starts off in English, but by the end of the book it's always in Japanese. So it slowly shifts words over.
And there's not very many books that do that. So I used to do it with children's comic books, like for four year olds and five year olds. I was reading like, really, because you have to know about 3000 letters to read in Japanese, so it's very. Very much a big project. It's not like just learning the 46 letters of the alphabets.
So that was always my process. Once I learned a word and I would learn the word for monkey, 'cause there's a super monkey in the comic book, and I could know that, then I would learn the word for white and yellow and that would help me with my process. But there's very few books that actually do that, and I know it has a lot to do with copyright issues, which is.
It's very hard to get a book that's in two languages, which would be the best. Oh, I wish Harry Potter would start off in English that ended up in Japanese. That would be amazing. By book seven, you'd be a master. Can't really do that. But that's something I was like, oh, chat, I guess could do that. An AI tool could do that, but that's maybe only something that interests me.
Not a lot of people. And I know that there's a lot of different ways of trying to learn, but also exactly that. Most ways don't. Work in most ways are designed really around the initial sale, not around the longevity. 'cause the real profit is in the early student, not the later student. Once you sell that, you've just
Kerstin: told me the story of my business for 10 years.
Yes. This is why most
Jonathan Green 2024: people, they buy, very few people stay the distance and again. Once you, 'cause it's oh, I sell in the pack of tapes. That's where the money is. It's at the front load. Like the large quantity of customers who wanna learn it. But that's why so few people actually learn a new language.
But. My experience has always been the really, the only way that absolutely works is immersion. That's the only choice. When you go somewhere where you're not allowed to speak your native language, then you have no choice but to learn. I, and also
Kerstin: that's the most difficult I would contest that. I would contest that.
I think that is
the problem is that. We hear a lot of success stories that tell that story and we don't hear a lot of success stories that because it's a lot slower to get to extremely high levels without moving to the country, without that kind of smash bang, immersion. We don't really hear the stories, but I moved to England.
I was already way fluent in English, but sorry, my native language is not English. But. My French and my Welsh are languages that I have at fairly high level, not fully comfy. There is a level that I wouldn't reach without moving there, but way beyond what a beginner would be, advanced level French and Welsh and it's just, I just study them on the side.
But you're also like a late master. But in wel I've been studying on the, but in wel I have the confidence of somebody who knows I can do it. And the other thing is in Welch, I've been doing it for eight years and I just, I'm just in no rush.
Jonathan Green 2024: Yeah. I'm not saying that other methods don't work, I'm saying that the one method I know that has the highest success rate because you have no choice.
And it's just like you wanna teach a bird to fly, you push it out the nest, it has no choice. So it's. Also the most painful way, and I know people who've made huge mistakes linguistically with their children with that method. So it doesn't always work, but that's the only method I know where you really, you actually give a hundred percent because you don't have any choice.
Whereas a lot of people, when you're taking language classes, because I took language, nobody in America actually speaks Spanish. They take Spanish for 12 years or 14 years and they graduate high school. They don't know any Spanish. Kinda like most people in England. Dunno any French, even though they take 12 years of French or six years of French, because we don't take it seriously.
It doesn't stick
Kerstin: well. One of the big issues just have to pass the test. One of the big issues, and you're certainly right about that, is that a lot of people wait to be good enough to speak and you're never gonna be good enough to speak if you don't speak. You have to be, can I say crap on your podcast?
You have to be crap. You have to be really bad at it. Then you get better. And that is a level outside your comfort zone. That, again, I think this is the, this is very true about me as a learner. And I think about my personality. It's like I really enjoy being bad at it. Things like I, I do, I like the dabble, I like the, all that.
There is an element there where the confidence comes in and because of that, they don't speak and because you're an English native speaker, there is almost no place. Very exceptional circumstances. Yes. But there is almost no place as an English native speaker where you really have to learn a foreign language.
There is still a level of want to, and. Start, yes, if you move like completely outta, say you're from the USS, if you completely leave your entire continent. Possibly, but say if you're moving to Germany and most places have expert communities that are very English speaking and insular, you just don't have to.
So there is always this level of motivation, and I love exploring that and I love working with people on the benefits that we can get when we stop imagining that we have to and we start really engaging with language learning as an intellectual pursuit, as an enrichment to our lives, as something that.
It gives us more for the longer term and adds to your happiness because that changes the perspective of what language learning is, and it stops this kind of idea of oh, in order to learn language, I have to this, and this because you don't, it all comes in its own time. And this is a more.
Sustainable way of looking at language learning with really great longevity. And to be honest, that if we are comparing to kids, that is what kids do. Yes, kids are thrown in and they have to communicate, they have to learn that in one language. So if you present number three, they're just gonna pick up three.
That's, that is a similar thing, but the idea of joy and the idea of playing with it and observing who's around in order to be naughty, this kind of entertaining yourself with it and making yourself little challenges and gamifying it, for lack of a better word, that is intrinsic to us.
That's what brings us in.
Jonathan Green 2024: So do you think that AI will lead to a world where people learn more languages or people go in the other direction? Just reply on auto, rely on auto translators. What do you think the future's gonna bring?
Kerstin: Oh, that's fascinating question. I would love, if you, if I could find the thing that makes everybody learn more languages, I genuinely believe we'd have a better world.
There's a part of me that believes that's gonna bring us world peace if we all just spoke and saw each other's perspectives. Of course, if we are merely doing it for a transactional, functional perspective, then we are missing out on that kind of human element and the unbelievable. Benefits, you'll be familiar with just encountering somebody who lives life differently and who has a different worldview and who maybe does a different thing on Easter or does it like I live in a different, I grew up in a different place to my husband and we still, we have such a different idea of what Christmas is or what meal to eat at Christmas or what kind of activities to do on Christmas.
And we are from countries that are very close to each other. So this kind of.
Amazing power of seeing the world differently, obviously is never gonna be replaced by ai. What I would hope though is that in a similar way to Duolingo it just opens up people's minds more and adds a little bit of curiosity. And then if you have to do something transactional and you're relying on the auto translator, then do it.
That's fine. I do that too. That's, there's no shame. And it's not you've now sabotaged all your learning that you're ever gonna do. Like it. It can take away a little bit of fear and it can take a little away, a little bit of hesitation and what you don't know today, you might pick up in future. So I'm actually, I'm quite positively encouraged by the way that we have access to fairly decent quality
language generation and kind of play. Know in so many languages. Now it's fun and that's where it should be. Now, if we can take the pressure and performance out of it and demonstrate how fun it is, which it really can be, if you head over to your chat GPT and start, okay, give me every third word in Spanish and it'll, it does it, there's a sense of.
Excitement and accomplishment there, like your idea of the book. I don't think that's just you who's interested in it, but you getting to make something exactly how you want it in your target language, then it's no longer about, oh, how well are you performing Japanese? It's about, oh, I did this cool thing.
This is exactly what I wanted, [00:20:00] and that is the feeling that will keep you coming back and we'll keep you doing it. And the learning success, it'll come as a side effect of you enjoying yourself.
Jonathan Green 2024: I think that's interesting. I hope that things do go in that direction, because certainly I think there's a lot of value to learning new languages, and there's often this fear, like my children wanted to join this new TaeKwonDo club, that's everyone said, oh, your kids can't go. It's only for the Korean kids.
And I was like, fight the teacher, then let's find out let's see what's up. And I went there and the guy's yeah, I don't speak, he only speak, he doesn't speak English, he only speaks Korean. It wasn't, he's yeah, that's fine. The class in Korean. I was like, yeah they'll learn it.
That's fine. The kids, half their friends are Korean. There's a lot of their friends. They know a lot of the words. Anyways, I was like, it's not a problem for them. And they've never once come home and said, we didn't know what the teacher wanted us to do. Yeah. So it was like this idea that. Every other parent had this approach that was like, oh, white kids aren't allowed, or mixed kids aren't allowed.
And it wasn't that at all. I was like, teacher's, like the teacher doesn't know any English. 'cause he lives in an expat community. That's another expat community that's not ours, which is totally fine. And I was like, yeah, that's a better experience. I was like, wait. So they get to learn Korean and they get to learn TaeKwonDo?
That's like a double win for me. So a lot of times we pull back from things or we misinterpret things. We'd heard from a lot of parents that it was like a really big deal, don't even try. And it took me ages to, to show up when the class was open because everyone didn't know what time it was at.
And then it was like the easiest conversation I've ever had. The guy was like, oh yeah, these are the days of the week. Here's the T-shirts, here's the price. And it was not a big deal at all, but everyone thought it was. But it's a good experience. There's this idea that. Doing things outside your language is really hard and it's not really true.
So I've had experience with that. 'cause I did karate in Japan and I didn't know any of the words they were saying, but I can tell what's happening when someone's punching at me. Yeah. Like it's a, it's easy to do something that's very visual. It's a lot harder if you're like drawing or doing something that you can't see.
But watching someone, you just watch the person across from you and go, oh, I'll just do whatever they're doing. I could do yoga in any language 'cause I just watch someone else in the class. I don't have to know what the teacher's saying. That's it. Yeah. So I assume is a good experience. So this is really cool.
This has given me a lot of perspective because I'm always thinking of ways to give my children advantage more than anything else, thinking how can they learn more languages? How can they open up new avenues? And they've certainly showed me that you can learn cool things from technology that I didn't think were possible.
So a lot of things have been changing even in the last 20 years of my life. So this has been really cool. I thank you so much for giving me so much of your time. Kirsten, where can people find out more about you? Find out about your AI language club and. Just see what's possible with AI and learning new
Kerstin: languages.
Yes. Oh, I'd love if people are curious and they want to play a little bit with ai in order to learn the language. We do really. We've got tutorials for all levels and. Generally speaking, I would say they work in all languages as long as the AI tool knows the language. So if you're learning something extremely minority just come and ask us and we can have a little look or we can have a little play beforehand.
But a lot of my tutorials are in. Welsh, for example, I demoed the tool in Welsh, which is a minority language or minoritized language. But otherwise, if you're learning any language that you know, you will, you can buy a textbook in, you can get so much out of AI and don't. Necessarily throw your textbook away.
This really is about opening up a new perspective and trying out something new rather than replacing every single thing. So we are giving you a new dimension, but really as people who know a lot about learning, with a lot of experience and tutoring and interpreting and all sorts of experience, and we're very nerdy, particularly my partner is very excited about the tech.
So it is@ailanguageclub.com and we've got a free training there that you can sign up and really learn more about how we're making it all work and AI language club. Is open at the moment from $9 a month. So it's very affordable for you to join us and just give it a try. And you can also find me and my blog, which is more about motivation, psychology, and how to get organized in language learning and say learning multiple languages together.
So if you're really into language learning, that's fluent language.co uk.
Jonathan Green 2024: Amazing. I'll put all the links in the show notes and blow the videos. Thank you so much for being here. This has been another amazing episode. Of the artificial intelligence podcast.
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