TL;DR Summary
AI accelerates language learning by giving you unlimited customized input and targeted feedback. Explore your interests and complex topics more easily with AI-generated listening and reading material. Generate audio, summarize books, create cross-language reading resources, explore academic topics, and strengthen speaking and writing through rapid, personalized examples.

Artificial intelligence is quickly ingraining itself into our daily lives. Some are frightened by it. Others are more enthusiastic. Regardless, it’s most fruitful to approach AI with a mindset of growth and self-improvement.

  • How can AI help me improve as a language learner?
  • How does AI make language learning easier?
  • What specific tools can I use to learn more effectively?

I’m not an AI expert, but I’ve been heavily exploring these questions through my own studies. In this post, let’s explore how to use AI for language learning.

1) Generate Custom Audio

As language learners, we should always be looking for high-quality listening material. We should listen to content that’s familiar, understandable, and interesting. Unfortunately, especially for beginners and lower-intermediate learners, this content isn’t always easy to find. Truly meaningful content is too difficult, whereas beginner-friendly content is too boring.

The arrival of AI has empowered language learners. Ask and you shall receive. If you can’t find the learning material that you’re looking for, generate it yourself. Recently, I’ve been producing custom audio with NotebookLM. NotebookLM renders podcasts, articles, and even entire books more comprehensible. It synthesizes and condenses the resources, offering the following:

  • Summaries
  • Study guides
  • Briefing documents
  • Mind maps
  • Chat conversations
  • Audio overviews
  • Interactive audio

I appreciate the brevity and quality of the audio overviews. This is a great entry point into more advanced topics. To take it a step further, I can import the material into LingQ, read and listen with an interactive transcript, and understand the material more deeply.

2) Boost Your Reading Comprehension with AI

Summarize Books

I’m a fan of using AI to increase my understanding of a book or area of study. For example, I’ve been reading a large amount of self-help books in Turkish. I’ve found that AI-generated summaries of these self-help books are accurate and rich in high-frequency vocabulary. For example, reading a 1,000-word summary of Atomic Habits in Turkish enables me to approach the actual book with more confidence.

Read Across Languages

Thanks to AI, I’m able to incorporate resources not available in my target language into my studies. Returning to the example of the self-help genre in Turkish, I can create more reading material in Turkish based on resources originally published in English (or any other language). A collection of AI-generated Turkish articles and summaries—drawing from English sources–strengthens my reading ability on this topic in my target language.

Explore Your Academic Interests

AI challenges you to be an autonomous learner. What do you want to learn? What type of material do you want to read? As a language learner, I quite enjoy diving into history. I use ChatGPT to create articles on the history of the Ottoman Empire, 20th century Turkey, etc. Of course, my goal is to read authentic, human resources in Turkish. However, AI lets me access these types of topics earlier in my language learning journey.

3) Improve Your Speaking & Writing with AI

Personally, I’m not interested in talking to a robot. I don’t enjoy talking to ChatGPT. However, while speaking with my tutor, I’ve seen how AI can enhance the effectiveness of our sessions together. For example, if my tutor notices that I’m struggling with a particular structure or topic of conversation, he will use AI to generate examples for me to review.

AI’s value lies in the sheer quantity of feedback that it’s able to produce. I can target my writing and speaking with infinite examples, comments, review activities, etc.

Final Thoughts

The value of AI is most felt by language learners with clear goals and interests. If you’re able to define what you want to listen to, the difficulty, the accent, etc., you can generate it. AI can make us stronger listeners, stronger readers, and more independent, curious learners.

FAQs

1. How can I learn a language with AI?
The more independent you are as a learner, the greater benefit you’ll reap from AI. Think of the material you want to read and listen to. Think of the feedback and practice you need to target. It’s possible to generate all of this with AI. You just need to ask for it.

2. Is AI helpful for beginners?
Yes. AI can help beginners more easily access intermediate/interesting topics. Use AI to simplify, summarize, and synthesize–make difficult learning material more comprehensible.

3. Can AI replace human tutors?
I learn languages to connect with other people, not talk to robots. However, AI can enhance sessions with a tutor—creating examples, drilling problem areas, and expanding practice materials.

4. How does AI help with reading comprehension?
You can use AI to summarize books, rewrite texts at different difficulty levels, and produce articles in your target language based on resources from other languages.

5. Can AI improve my speaking and writing?
Yes. With unlimited examples, corrections, and targeted exercises, AI makes it easier to identify weak points and practice them more thoroughly.