A great way to improve your language learning with Chat GPT and Natural Reader.
THE METHOD
To create this wonderful version of The Little Prince in English and Ukrainian, I have translated from English to Ukrainian using Chat GPT. It is teaching me a lot, and you can learn from this process too!
I take a very small chunk of the text at a time, just a few sentences or one small paragraph. I ask Chat GPT to translate to Ukrainian, and I study each word. I question the AI, asking it to explain each word, and asking for alternatives that I can choose from, until I get the translation I want.
I then paste the text into Natural Reader and I can hear what I have written being read out in slow, clear Ukrainian. Natural Reader is a text to speech app that covers 27 languages including Ukrainian.
If you want to simply enjoy The Little Prince in English and Ukrainian, download chapter 1 from the button above, and watch my YouTube Channel for further episodes coming soon.
If you want to use this same deliberate practice to improve your Ukrainian, you don’t have to translate someone else’s book. You can write your own! Continue to read about my study techniques.
My Duolingo Diary, Ukrainian Edition, Section 2, gives you 35 chapters based on the second half of the Ukrainian for English speakers course from Duolingo. Each chapter gives you 9 or more writing prompts in Ukrainian and English, so you can write your own short responses in Ukrainian.
Use Chat GPT to translate your English to Ukrainian and make sure your grammar is correct. One advantage Chat GPT has over Google Translate, is that you can pick a word from the translation and ask for alternatives, enabling you to use words you are familiar with. You can also request the language to be adjusted for gender or formality, and you can ask for explanations at every step of the way, whether you want to know about word order, case, tense, or any other aspect of a sentence’s construction that you don’t understand.
I call this kind of learning “deliberate practice”, and it is hugely beneficial to me, meaning I get much more from the time I have with Ukrainian friends and teachers. I use Natural Reader to voice texts when I am happy with them. I often have further questions for Chat GPT generated by listening to the text through Natural Reader. I love Natural Reader because I can adjust the speed the speakers read at, I can choose from a range of voices, and most importantly, I can download the audio. I have paid for a commercial licence so I can use the audio on YouTube, but if I was just using it for private study, I wouldn’t even have to pay! So Natural Reader is a winner.
My Duolingo Diary, Ukrainian Edition, Section 2 doesn’t just give you writing prompts. There are also vocab lists to write out in cursive, and a cursive alphabet at the top of each page to help you get familiar with that. There are jumbled dialogues for you to unscramble and perform. There is information about the grammar focus of each Duolingo unit, in section 2 of the Ukrainian for English speakers course.
My dear friend and language teacher, Iryna Zhomer, (a real-life Ukrainian human and Ukrainian language expert) has helped me to create My Duolingo Diary, Ukrainian Edition, Section 2, so you can be assured that the writing is of good quality, and will provide you with a great scaffold for your own deliberate practice. My dear friend Oksana Shevchuk is in the process of helping me practice my studies, asking and answering the questions, and going through this book in our conversation classes. I thank her for her patience and good humour.
You can buy this book from Amazon.
Read a sample unit and watch my videos about the book.
Spanglish Fantástico 