Every language course I’ve ever taken began with how to have a simple conversation, but I don’t think I’ve ever been taught what to do when those conversations break down. And they do break down. All the time. Especially for beginners.
This post recaps a conversation I had with ChatGPT about what I think is a crucial - yet often missing - first lesson in language learning: How to keep conversations moving when the bottom falls out.
I call it The Rip-Cord Protocol.
As I focus more specifically on ear-training, I’m noticing stages of progress in my ability to unpack the noise into recognizable chunks, but how many stages should I expect on this journey? And what do they look like?
There are a cluster of words I’ve been more or less ignoring in norsk; words like “jo” and “vel.” They seem to come scattered randomly in sentences, shifting the nuance somehow, but I’ve been so busy focusing on what the nouns and verbs are doing that I haven’t unpacked all those dangly bits.
Today I decided to take the plunge, in another installment of Useful Conversations With ChatGPT…