The German teacher in my DMs

Welcome to another episode of me procrastinating from German study by playing with LLMs and no-code tools. I go to German school now, then come home and read only German, watch only German TV, and text my friends only in German. I’m lucky enough to have friends who’ll indulge that.

Context

The trouble with texting your German friends in German is that nobody replies to a mangled sentence with a correction, they just work out what you meant and move on. Which is kind, and completely useless to me.

So I was firing off broken German every day and getting nothing back. What I wanted was a German teacher in my pocket. Someone to check the message before it went out, and tell me what I’d get wrong next time.

How it’s built

Six steps in Zapier, no code. I paste the sentence into a Discord channel and about a minute later Frau Deutsch replies with what’s broken, how a German would say it, and a score out of ten.

The stack

• Discord · Where I paste the sentence and where the corrections come back.
• Zapier · Polls the channel and moves the message between the other three.
• relevance.ai · Runs Frau Deutsch. Three chained prompts on GPT-3.5.
• Notion · The log. One row per sentence.

Frau Deutsch is three prompts, not one

The first prompt marks the sentence and explains what’s wrong. The second grades it. The third exists only because GPT-3.5 wouldn’t hand back a clean number on its own.

Imagine you are a teacher who teaches german. You are helping a student who speaks intermediate german improve.

You have given the student the following feedback {{ sentence_feedback.answer }} for his original text {{ text }}

Please give him a score between 1 to 10 grading how correctly written the sentance was. 1 means that the sentence is unintellible and 10 is that the sentence is perfect.

Learnings

• Being corrected in the moment beat every textbook exercise. The fix sticks because I wanted to say that exact thing, to that exact person, right then.
• Losing the fear of being annoying mattered more than the grammar. Once I trusted the sentence landed, I sent a lot more of them.
• The score was an afterthought and became the reason I kept going. Watching it creep up did more for my motivation than any lesson.
• Reading a month of feedback back to back shows the same mistakes over and over. Every two or three weeks I push the whole Notion table back through relevance.ai and study what comes out.

Next steps

What I’d do again

Putting it in Discord was a trade. I did it so my friends could use Frau Deutsch too, and the cost is that everything lands in one table with no split per person. For a tool for me and a few mates, I’d take that trade again.

What’s still broken

• Discord polls once a minute, so texting through it is slow.
• The Correct sentence column in Notion is empty. The corrected sentence goes to Discord and never gets written to the log.

What I want to build

• Wire it into my flashcard tool. There’s no direct Zapier integration, so I’d have to learn webhooks and build that bit myself.
• Get Frau Deutsch to pull out the new verbs I’m reaching for, usually because I typed the English word and hoped she’d correct me, and push those into my flashcards.

Frau Deutsch kept me writing German to my friends until I had my B1 certificate. I don’t ask for feedback any more.