Some people think it's going to make learning languages unnecessary,

which I don't believe, but it is going to have an effect on

language learning and no question.

So I would like to review what I consider to be.

Those are the four key elements of efficient use of technology to improve

our outcomes in language learning.

What I call the pace of change in language learning technology.

By pace, I refer to portability, adaptability.

Connectivity and efficiency.

Those are the four ingredients.

And these are the things that I will be looking for going forward.

So first of all, I'd like to review historically what has happened when it

comes to language learning technology.

We don't know, at least I don't know that much about how people learn languages in

ancient Greece or Mesopotamia or Egypt.

There are some indications that it was largely based either on

reading texts with translations.

Or very small groups of students studying with a teacher or simply interacting

with speakers of other languages, bearing in mind that only a small number of

people were traveling unless they were part of a, you know, an invasion of a

neighboring country or merchants that traveled, but the bulk of people, they

simply lived and died in their little village and had limited opportunity to

connect with speakers of other languages.

So what has happened over the years?

Well, we see a move towards more portability.

Pencils came along, printing came along.

We're no longer dependent on writing materials, which were perhaps papyrus

or papyrus, however, it's pronounced was cheaper in Egypt, but more

expensive in Greece, our people were, you know, using, uh, some kind of clay

tablets, but it wasn't very portable.

And over the years, our ability to write things down, eventually to record

things in terms of recording audio.

Recording video right up until the last 45 years has been a movement towards

more portability, more connectivity, adaptability in the sense of increasing

the ability of the learner to access content of interest, to sort of.

Concentrate on needs or perceived needs or a style of learning that, uh, suited

his tastes or her tastes, and I think to some degree increasing efficiency.

However, we're still basically back at the same model as in.

And that is that we need the input.

We need to find an opportunity to use the language.

Our brains haven't changed.

We are still essentially the same people as those people back in ancient Egypt,

Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, you name it.

So is that going to change going forward?

Is there more talk about information technology?

Whereas in reality, we're still facing the same difficulties.

And when I say the same difficulties, I refer back to this idea that language

learning amounts to motivation on the part of the learner and time, the amount

of time available to learn and the efficiency with which we learn with,

you know, a limited amount of time.

Those two key factors haven't changed.

So how has information technology or modern technology changed that?

If I look at it from my own experience, what was to me revolutionary was

initially the mini disc player, then followed by the MP3 player.

That made audio portable.

The next big thing was of course, the availability of.

Online texts where you could quickly look material up in a dictionary.

This is kind of at the origin of LingQ.

It made it possible to manipulate text, to manipulate audio, which was, you

know, revolutionary from my perspective.

What we now see is that social media is a major form of technical innovation

when it comes to language learning.

I can go to YouTube, find podcasts or YouTube channels with very

interesting Material on a variety of subjects in just about any language.

And, uh, here again, with the introduction of, uh, automatic translation or

automatic, uh, transcription services, uh, we can access this material and

use it for our language learning.

We can also connect as is this example.

With this, uh, very interesting podcast that I found in Levantine

Arabic, where I saw an interview with a Lebanese entrepreneur who mentioned

that he was active on Instagram.

So I went and looked him up on Instagram.

I don't know what it does in terms of the efficiency of my learning,

but it is a form of engagement.

Because I am able to find content of interest and I'm able to learn about

different aspects of say, Lebanon, the difficulties they had during the

Lebanese civil war, the extent to which many of the sort of entrepreneurs and

intellectuals have moved to the Emirates.

And all of a sudden I'm interested in the Emirates and I'm thinking, Hey,

maybe I should go and visit there.

And so there's a lot of.

Um, engagement through this phenomenon of social media.

If I look at the speed of change over the last 40 years, say from 1980,

bearing in mind that I learned Chinese back in 1968 when we had the open reel,

uh, tape recorders, but if I look at the speed of change that has happened,

guaranteed this sort of pace of change is going to continue to accelerate.

And I should mention in that regard.

Just how useful a service chat GPT is.

Not only can I go to chat GPT and ask, can you recommend a podcast in

Spanish on, uh, the economy or on agriculture or on research into cancer?

And they will find a podcast.

I've done it.

So that's in terms of, again, adaptability, finding content that is,

you know, personalized to my interests.

But, uh, insofar as efficiency, I find that in language learning conjunctions,

connecting words are very useful.

They kind of form key elements in the sort of patterns of the language.

So if I asked, give me the 20 most common conjunctions in Levantine

Arabic with five examples for each, and almost instantly that's produced.

If I wanted to.

Conjugate a verb or decline a noun in any language that I'm learning, chat

GPT will give me that right away.

I even asked the difference between augmented reality and, uh, virtual

reality, and they gave me an explanation of that as well, which you can easily do.

And this is something that I've done by the way, here on my YouTube channel is

to get on there with a bunch of other people and we pretend we're something

else and, and we're speaking and I'm talking to an animal or something.

I don't know.

Or I see pictures of people in the classroom with these virtual reality

glasses on, and they are able to project themselves into an, uh, an environment.

Um, which I guess to some people might be perceived as an immersion

in that, in the language environment.

Personally, I find it a bit strange to be doing that.

If I'm in a classroom, I'd rather interact with the other people in the classroom,

but it's possible that in terms of engagement, people who are bored in a

classroom will find it more interesting to put on their virtual reality goggles

to project themselves into a cafe in Paris or, uh, or, uh, Noodle shop in Tokyo.

And again, this gets back this idea of adaptability.

Increasingly people will be able to do the things that they like doing.

Although people would have to buy these goggles unless the classroom provided it.

But I think that, uh, with increasing adaptability, it's increasingly possible

for people to study things that are of interest to them in ways that they like.

On their own and the, the idea of the classroom, if we get back to, you know,

ancient Greece where the, presumably the tutor or the teacher was in charge

of everything, and certainly that's been the pattern in our classrooms.

And to a large extent, the teaching community wants to protect that

role where the teacher is in charge.

I think that's going to be one of the results of, uh, increasing

availability of other tools.

People can design their own.

Language learning path, find their own content, pursue those

aspects of the language that are most interesting to them.

Augmented reality in contrast to virtual reality from what I understand is the

idea that, uh, wherever you are, say you're in China and you see a bunch

of stuff written on a menu, you can immediately see that in your language,

or maybe it can, it can be converted into audio, or there's different ways that

the reality that you are experiencing.

Can be either converted into something that's easier for you to understand.

Or, uh, something that can be a learning opportunity.

Again, I am not sort of that much into those things.

I am, as you know, more focused on input based learning.

So I asked chat GPT to write me a story in Spanish about a person

going through a difficult divorce.

Uh, I'm not going through a divorce by the way, difficult or otherwise.

But I just thought it would be an example of a very specific sort of context.

And almost immediately ChatGPT writes this story.

I could use a text to speech technology to listen to that story.

We at, at LingQ regularly, when I import a podcast, they are, you know, transcribed

and timestamped so that I can study that text sentence by sentence in LingQ.

So that's another form or another way of how we use, you

know, artificial intelligence.

To make language learning content portable, because I can see it

on my iPhone, more adaptable or more personalized, connecting.

I'm connecting to someone in, from Lebanon who now lives in Abu

Dhabi, uh, and it's efficient.

So, you know, these different applications of information technology.

Do match this, these sort of four criteria.

Now in all of that, there are some applications which I don't

care for, but others might, for example, I'm not into quizzes.

So there was one application, uh, I think it was a Busu Alexa

or something where you could be, Quizzed while working in the kitchen.

I'm not interested in being quizzed.

That's not my style.

I'm not interested in pretending to speak to someone, but there

are people who like that.

I still stick with the idea that just as with artificial intelligence,

the ability, uh, say a chat GPT to answer questions apparently is based

on its ability to answer questions.

I'm sure some of you understand it better, but apparently this is very

predict the next word based on maybe a hundred words back, they're able to

predict what the next word is going to be, and that's how they're able to answer.

I don't, I must admit, don't understand it.

I'm sure some of you understand it better, but apparently this is very similar to

how the human brain processes language.

And the more this model of automatic transcription or any automatic text

generation, the more it's based on this predictive ability, the more similar

it is to the way the brain learns.

Interesting, by the way, that I've always experienced the fact

that nouns are easier to remember and easier to learn than verbs.

And there are apparently various reasons for this.

But one of the interesting things that comes out of research that I discovered

while preparing for this is that verbs are much more dependent on context.

In other words, we need to see a variety, a diverse range of contexts

with any particular verb in order to be able to remember that verb.

Whereas nouns, it's more a matter of.

So the high frequency nouns normally learn them more quickly, but in any

case, our ability to produce the language is based on what we have

in our memory one way or another.

And so while many people want to speak the language, as you've

heard me say many times, I don't consider that a big priority.

Rather, I want to build up this capability within myself to

have that language in memory.

And as I start using it, as I have a, a meaningful opportunity to use it,

I'll get better and better at using it.

And in that sense, that method of learning is more similar to what

they used to do in ancient Greece, apparently, where the emphasis was

on reading texts with translation.

So obviously technology has moved a long way since ancient Greece.

And I think it's going to, this, uh, It's the pace again, P A C E, the pace

of innovation is going to accelerate where I'm certainly using whatever I can

use to help me in my language learning.

I'm sure you're doing the same and it's an exciting time to be

involved in language learning.

So, uh, with that, I'll leave you the video where I was involved in this,

uh, virtual reality, uh, experiment and, uh, one other video that I

think is relevant to this discussion.

I look forward to your comments.

Thank you.

Bye.