Hi. I'm Ben :)

Inspiration

I needed to learn Spanish for my exchange semester in Peru fast. I tried traditional language courses but I found it hard to prepare for lessons and review grammar topics before lessons. I did not feel motivated to practice anything because I was essentially not using much if any of my Spanish. I also tried Anki cards, they helped a lot with e.g. learning irregular verbs such as "ser" and "estar" but the usefulness ended just about there. Learning individual words or phrases, but also that got boring and repetitive quite fast and the actual learning was not 0 but close to that.

Then I started having conversations with LLMs and that was a game changer for me. I was finally forming sentences and I needed to communicate with someone and get my point across. But I found it to be cumbersome to start a new chat and look for the prompt I used to make the LLM behave the way I wanted it to and then it also only half the time did exactly what I wanted and I spent almost more time making sure the LLM was actually cooperating with me. Also I was missing the reminders to actually use this mode of learning.

So I was in the following situation: I use WhatsApp every day. I want to practice with LLMs. The LLM usually does not do what I want it to do and does not remember stuff.