Language learning with AI

I was reading a discussion on Hacker News about language learning tools. One comment by “sieve” got my interest, “I have to say that Krashen’s input hypothesis and Orberg’s Lingva Latina is probably the way to go if you are learning languages as an adult.”

This sounded interesting, so I looked into it:

Krashen’s Input Hypothesis says that we acquire language when we understand messages — what he calls “comprehensible input.” You learn best when you are exposed to language just a little above your current level (what he calls i+1), in a natural, low-stress way — not mainly by memorizing grammar rules or vocabulary lists.

That was what ChatGPT had to say about it. Not sure if true, but makes sense. Generating this kind of stories sounds like a job for LLM, so I asked ChatGPT 4o

write me sample story in Spanish with the “n+1” principle, based on the assumption that I’m complete novice

First I got a short one

Pedro es un niño.
Pedro tiene un gato.
El gato es blanco.
Pedro ama a su gato.
El gato duerme en la casa.
Pedro dice: “¡Hola, gato!”
El gato dice: “Miau.”
Pedro ríe.
Pedro da leche al gato.
El gato bebe la leche.
Pedro y el gato son amigos.

And ChatGPT also offered to write a longer one. Since the story was nicely split into short chapters, I thought it might be interesting to generate accompanying images.

creating spanish language tutorial book for beginners. I have have short story, let’s create some images inspired by it. I’m showing the image along the text that I give you: (first paragraph here)
Create a single image that would fit on this page.

I was expecting just the images, but got actually more. ChatGPT decided to include the requested text on the images, which turned out pretty nice. I copy-pasted the rest of the paragraphs one-by-one and got a picture for each. The results were quite good. I did not give any specific instructions for the images. They turned out to be quite consistent without any extra prompting.

See below and learn some spanish!