I’ve pointed this out before on HN, but if you want to use ChatGPT as a language partner, you must provide a topic. Expecting it to behave as a proactive teacher is a recipe for disappointment.
Here’s what I typically do:
- Create a custom GPT (mine is called Polly the Glot) with a system prompt instructing it to act as a language partner that responds only in Chinese or your target language of choice. Further specify that the user will paste a story or topic before beginning practice, and that this should guide the discussion.
- Start a new chat.
- Paste in an article from AP/Reuters.
- Turn on Voice Chat.
At that point, I’ll head out to walk my dog and can usually get about 30 minutes to an hour of solid language practice in.
Fair warning, you'll likely need to be at least an intermediate student by this point otherwise it'll probably be too much over your head.
Caveat: You could including a markdown file of your known vocabulary as an knowledge attachment in the custom GPT but I've no idea how well that would work in practice.
I have played around pretty significantly with the markdown context idea but managing it by hand is pretty tough.
- I take chinese tutoring lessons on italki with a tutor who uses notion (copy paste in markdown)
- I copy/paste our notion notes in markdown into a repo for storage
- I use AI to summarize lessons and to keep general context on progress
- I use AI to generate a voice AI lesson plan, such as 10 words to focus on, reviewing a specific human tutoring session, or some conversational focus area.
- I start the advanced voice AI with the context
Unfortunately the AI still loses the plot pretty quickly and devolves into free form conversation. It struggles significantly to enforce any kind of structure that would be helpful for structured learning. I haven't tried this in a few months though, maybe newer models are improving.
Here’s what I typically do:
- Create a custom GPT (mine is called Polly the Glot) with a system prompt instructing it to act as a language partner that responds only in Chinese or your target language of choice. Further specify that the user will paste a story or topic before beginning practice, and that this should guide the discussion.
- Start a new chat.
- Paste in an article from AP/Reuters.
- Turn on Voice Chat.
At that point, I’ll head out to walk my dog and can usually get about 30 minutes to an hour of solid language practice in.
Fair warning, you'll likely need to be at least an intermediate student by this point otherwise it'll probably be too much over your head.
Caveat: You could including a markdown file of your known vocabulary as an knowledge attachment in the custom GPT but I've no idea how well that would work in practice.