Language learning for the contemporary adult learner can be broken down roughly into four highly correlated, but distinct, skillsets.
| Passive understanding | Active production | |
|---|---|---|
| The written word | Reading | Writing |
| The spoken word | Listening | Speaking |
You may know from my FOSS software that I have been learning Finnish for the past 4 years or so. For the first few years I pretty much focused exclusively on reading comprehension, as I consider that to be the easiest quadrant to skill up in first. This focus put me in the interesting position for some time of being able to read most YA fiction and tax documents while being unable to order a pizza for myself on the phone.
Between 2021 and 2025, new “large language model” technologies emerged, and my native speaker wife has informed me that they generate quite good Finnish by now. This has opened up a powerful new writing technique for skilling up in active writing, not just reading, using the same spaced repetition flashcard based software I love so much.
The technique is quite simple:
- Add a system prompt for your LLM to turn it into a sentence tutor. (I will put mine at the end of this post. It works quite well.)
- Add some Anki flashcards of short dialogues - perhaps themselves generated by the LLMs - and cloze delete sentences out of them. For the cloze deletion hint, put your L1 translation.
- Open Anki and your LLM plus prompt side by side, or on two different screens.
- Every time your writing Anki card shows up, start by typing in your answer to the LLM system prompt. Hit “Enter”, and read through its critique of your sentence.
- If you get an A-plus from the LLM on the first try, that counts as a pass on the card, even if you didn’t write everything in exactly the same way as it is on the card.
- If you don’t,
- Keep iterating with the LLM based on its feedback until you write a sentence that does.
- Mark the card as “Again”, and continue along.
Here are some screenshots of the loop in action. First I open the two side by side:
I am asked to translate “Yes, private beach and rowboat included in the price.” I give it my best shot: “Kyllä, yksityinen ranna ja vene sisältyvät hintaan.” I am a little shaky on yksityinen being the right word, but confident on the rest. I also either don’t know, or can’t retrieve from passive memory, the word for “rowboat” specifically - I substitute “vene”, the generic word for boat.
I hit enter. To my surprise, yksityinen was right - but ranna, the word next to it, was wrong! It should have been ranta, with a T.
I try again. I still can’t bring to mind what “rowboat” would mean. LLMs are great at this kind of semantic search, so I make up a word that vaguely fills the space - ponnistusvene, a fake Finnish word that connotes “pushing boat”.
The LLM recommends two words that look like they might hold promise: soutuvene, and kumivene. Let’s try the first one. Does that mean rowboat?
It does! Now let’s finally see what is on the other side of the Anki card:
I can read this perfectly fine, even though I couldn’t produce it. The language here is much more laid back and informal than the book-speak I actually wrote: “Joo” instead of “Kyllä” (yes), “oma” (your own) instead of “yksityinen” (a private), “kuuluu” (belongs to) instead of “sisältyivät” (is included in). Nevertheless, had I generated the sentence we ended up with on the right on my first go, I would still probably mark the Anki card as Good, because I would have said the same thing semantically - just in a more formal register. And that’s fine by me, for now.
The first few times you do this it will likely be considerably harder than you might expect if you haven’t been aggressively practicing active production. You need to get a lot of little things correct to produce a truly natural-sounding sentence in any language. Don’t give up! The difficulty is a sign you’re learning!
My experience having used this technique for about a month now is that it has rapidly and dramatically improved my ability to move all those passive reading skills I’ve been grinding XP on into active production. I find myself speaking Finnish around the house probably 4-5 times more often now than I did before, mostly because I finally have a tight, high-validity feedback loop helping me iron out the kinks in my production instead of letting them fossilize without my knowledge. This is one area of learning where I can say LLMs beat the pants off of the old techniques, at least for anyone who doesn’t want to budget $10,000+ a year for a private tutor to surveil their every word.
The prompt I use for Finnish
(N.B.: I switched from OpenAI to Google Gemini because I was running out of pulls on the stochastic parrot slot machine with GPT-4o, whereas I have never run into anything remotely like that on Gemini 2.5 Flash. That’s why GPT occurs in this prompt.)
| |
| |