Polyglot on a Budget
Transforming Language Learning with ChatGPT
There’s nothing as good as a dedicated personal language tutor for learning a language. They’re a quality source of comprehensible input — and comprehensible input is what you need to learn a language.
Unfortunately, language tutors can be hard to find, expensive, and, if you’re eclectic with languages like me — often preferring to go broad rather than deep — you’d need to find a polyglot tutor as well.
Fortunately, our good friend ChatGPT is here to help. It speaks (or at least reads and writes) all languages, and the subscription for a whole month is the same as the cost of a professional language tutor for an hour.
ChatGPT is good for drilling down into indivdiual languages. Some of the stories below give lightly-edited transcripts of my conversations with GPT, so you can get an idea of how you can leverage it for your own languages. Others, like the Swahili post, have GPT in the background to fill in the (massive) gaps of my own Swahili knowledge, as well as to illustrate with some pretty…
