How to Use ChatGPT to Learn English Well | The Secret to Training “English Thinking”

Today I want to share how I used GPT to turn myself into my own English teacher and cultivate English thinking. Actually, it only uses GPT’s translation ability as one middle step, but this approach to cultivating English thinking may be useful as a reference for everyone. I hope it can inspire you to come up with your own ideas.

Look, I’m 40-something and still learning English. The bottleneck I’ve run into may also trouble a lot of people: I actually know more than 90% of the words that come up in everyday English conversations. The problem is that I often don’t know how to pull out those words I clearly recognize and combine them into the meaning I want to express. I usually think in terms of how to say the Chinese expression in English, but when I translate it directly from Chinese, it sounds especially unnatural—classic Chinglish.

The more technical way to put it is that I lack “English thinking.”

So how can we improve? You might say, “Isn’t it simple? Just watch American TV shows with bilingual subtitles or English-language movies, right?” Well, can bilingual subtitles really make you familiar with how each line is naturally expressed in English?

But in practice, the results are often not very good. Those lines didn’t come out of your own brain. They aren’t things you wanted to say yourself, so the stimulation isn’t strong enough. They won’t give you that sudden realization: “Oh, so that’s how you say this in English.”

So what kind of study material can give you that sudden realization? Of course—the things you’ve said yourself. If you use unfamiliar Chinese material to learn English, neither the Chinese nor the English has a natural connection to your own brain. But if you use Chinese material you produced yourself, the Chinese side is naturally bound to your brain. It’s already planted in there, so wouldn’t the other side be much easier to get into your brain too?

So we need to skip all kinds of middlemen. Don’t go looking for some American TV show or celebrity interview. Instead, directly turn your own Chinese thinking into English thinking. That’s what gives you stimulation strong enough—and memorable enough.

Turning things you’ve said or written into natural English used to be too expensive. Didn’t you need to find a translator with a high enough level? But now that we have GPT, this translation wizard makes it easy.

So the whole process goes like this:

First, collect a piece of your own audio or written material, preferably something recent. For content creators like me, this step is a huge convenience: just find a video you made recently. But I think that as long as you put your mind to it, it shouldn’t be hard for anyone to organize some recent audio or writing of their own. Make a vlog, record a conversation with family or friends—with their consent, of course—record a meeting, copy a report you wrote recently, and so on. There are plenty of possible sources.

If you found written material, the next step is very simple. Open ChatGPT and use this prompt:

Translate the following passage into English, and output the original Chinese and the English translation sentence by sentence for comparison. Note: Please use natural English expressions in the translation.

I fed this prompt into ChatGPT, then casually copied in a script from my previous episode, “Why Are Humans the Only Species That Need to Wipe Their Buttocks?” It generated a Chinese-English parallel translation for me. I put it into the iPhone’s “Notes” app, and could happily start studying. Whenever I came across a word I didn’t recognize, I could also directly use the iPhone’s look-up function to check it, conveniently learning the vocabulary along the way.

But what if you found audio material? Then the process is a little more troublesome, but the learning results may be even better.

The steps are these: First, you can use the open-source software WhisperDesktop to transcribe the audio into an srt subtitle file with timestamps. For detailed instructions on using WhisperDesktop, or other ways to use OpenAI’s Whisper, I recommend looking for introductions by more professional tech bloggers. They’re pretty easy to find.

Then we still open ChatGPT and write a prompt.

Here’s the prompt I used:

You are an experienced film-subtitle translator with expertise in translating movie and TV subtitles. Please translate the timestamped Chinese subtitles I send you into bilingual Chinese-English subtitles, with English on top and Chinese underneath.

Rules:

• Please retain the timestamps during translation and make sure the output format follows the srt subtitle standard.
• For names, place names, technical terms, concepts, and other proper nouns, maintain consistency throughout the translation and use one standardized translation.
• Use natural English expressions in the translation.

This prompt was actually created for subtitles from films and TV shows I make myself, and in practice it works very well.

I pasted it into ChatGPT, and it said, “Of course. Please provide the Chinese subtitle file or specific text that needs to be translated…”

Then I sent ChatGPT the srt generated by WhisperDesktop, and it created bilingual subtitles for me.

Next, we save the bilingual srt subtitle file.

After the translation was finished, I created a new text document on my computer, changed the extension to srt, pasted in the translated subtitles, and saved it. I gave it the same filename as my video file and put the two files together.

If your material is an mp3, meaning audio only, I also recommend turning it into a video file with some random image in 剪映, so it’s easier to move on to the next step.

Then we can start learning happily. Open the video file in PotPlayer, and what you see is your own “blockbuster,” starring you and featuring bilingual subtitles.

For example, I saw a line in one of my videos: “But why does this kind of trouble seem to belong only to humans?”

If I followed my Chinese thinking and expressed this sentence in English myself, I would probably say: “But why this trouble only belongs to human?” That is basically just translating the Chinese expression directly into English.

But GPT translated it as: “But why does this trouble seem to be exclusively a human issue?” “Why is this kind of trouble an issue unique to humans?” That is a much more natural English expression. “Oh, so that’s how you say this in English.” This is a classic example of learning English expression and English thinking.

Using PotPlayer to learn also makes it easy to pick up vocabulary along the way. For example, if I don’t know the word “exclusively” in this sentence, I just click on it, and a search result for the word pops up. The dictionary entry for the word is right at the top. Haven’t I learned a new word along the way?

That’s basically the whole process of using GPT to turn things I’ve said myself into English-learning material. After trying this method for a while, I feel it has a much more obvious effect on improving English expression and English thinking than watching movies or TV shows.

All right, that’s where I’ll leave my thoughts on using your own output as material for cultivating English thinking. I hope this small idea inspires bigger ones. If you have better ways to learn, feel free to share them in the comments. I’m now a serious GPT power user, using GPT to help with writing, research, and taking reading notes. I can’t get through a day without it. Once I’ve explored these workflows a little further and they’re more mature, I’ll share what I’ve learned.

I’m Zhichao Wei. On this channel, I mainly share my three great loves: psychology, books, and movies. Of course, every now and then I also share what I’ve learned and what I’ve figured out at work, like today. If you enjoy my shows, please follow, like, save, and comment. It really matters to me. Thanks for your support, and see you in the next episode!