Motivation

“Le président Emmanuel Macron assure le peuple canadien que le gouvernement français va continuer à défendre le Canada contre la menace américain.”

Even if you don’t speak French, you can probably understand, or at least get the gist of, the above sentence: the French president Emmanuel Macron is assuring the “peuple canadien” (Canadian people) about something involving the “gouvernment français” (French government). Imagine reading thousands of sentences like this and gradually acquiring French, backdooring into the language using cognates you already know. This is known as comprehensible input, a language learning technique first advocated for by linguist Stephen Krashen in the 1980s.

Comprehensible input is a good language learning method, but creating comprehensible input is very hard. A native speaker has to painstakingly create thousands of sentences that speakers of another language can understand, slowly scaling up the difficulty as the learner progresses. Resources like this actually do exist for a number of languages. For example, learners of Latin can use Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, a book that teaches you Latin using exclusively sentences in Latin. However, writing this text took years of effort on the part of Hans Ørberg, a linguist who dedicated a large part of his life to teaching Latin. Ørberg carefully wrote the sentences in his book to only use cognates an English speaker could understand and to avoid any complicated syntax an English speaker would have a hard time understanding.

What if there was a way to automate the process of generating comprehensible input using large language models? Language models like GPT-4o and o1 have good enough reasoning ability to tell what words in a foreign language are and aren’t cognate with English. They can reliably generate sentences in other languages like French without any additional training. In short, this is an ideal use case for large language models.

What I did

I made a simple interactive language-learning app, hosted at cognateful.vkethana.com. It teaches you French using stories written exclusively in French.

Users are provided with a brief, ten-sentence story consisting of French sentences. The user’s task is to read the sentences and translate them into English. The app tells you whether or not your translation is correct using GPT-4o-powered scoring. Based on your performance on th...

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