Is it true anyone can speak Spanish in 15 minutes a day?

A little while ago, I blethered on about how impressed I’d been by one of those online language-learning platforms driven by AI. This post is a bit more on AI tools and learning a language—Spanish in my case.

For a while now, I’ve tried to motivate myself to squeeze in just ten minutes of Spanish vocabulary every day. It’s ages since I've sat down in front of a grammar book and ploughed through the unremitting grind of learning verb tables or trying to understand demonstrative pronouns, but I decided that trying to increase my vocabulary was reasonable enough. And I still look up the odd grammar point from time to time.

The adverts on Facebook and Insta insist that such things are unnecessary, and, much as I'd like to agree, I can't. Learning a language is, I think, one vast memory exercise. Obviously there are principles to understand, but language learning isn't driven by principles in the way that maths or chemistry is. Language is logical only to a point. There’s no logic behind an egg being a huevo or a rivet a remache; they just are. If we want to build sentences involving rivets and eggs (as we all so frequently do), then we need to know those words, and we’re going to need others, too. They may, grammatically, be verbs or adverbs, but it doesn't really matter what their names are so long as we can build the sentence we want. We may not be able to spot a disjunctive pronoun, but I bet we use them time after time without realising. It’s fine to say they'll just seep in, that babies learn that way, but tempting as the argument is, we all know it's not totally true. It’s just one part of the methodology.

Given that I’m not going to slog away at grammar again—I’ve served my time—the AI I was using suited me down to the ground because, principally, I used it as a conversation partner. It offers plenty of other features, of course, but mostly I just natter away. When guilt gets the better of me, I go to the grammar section of the AI. I let it throw in those textbookish sentences—the sentences to practice particular grammatical points that no human has ever uttered—I doubt that she has finished the project-type phrase. Sometimes I manage them perfectly; sometimes I'm a shambles.

The platform I use isn’t free, but on the “less than the cost of a cup of coffee a day” principle, it seems fair enough. I pay just under 20€ a month, which works out at around 75 céntimos a day. For that it limits me to 75 questions a day, maybe an hour’s worth of chatting. It’s far cheaper than the live tutors I used to use online. Which just goes to show: it’s not only people arriving in boats who are taking our jobs; the machines are joining in too. The apocalypse is clearly upon us.

I tend to use the AI on my laptop, though it works on my phone as well—or it should. Lately, it’s been playing up. One of the things I liked from the start was how well it understood what I was saying, unlike my car or even Alexa, who are both infuriatingly disobedient. The microphone listens, the programme transcribes my speech onto the screen, and then it either corrects my utterances on the screen or talks me through my errors. I keep switching from one to the other, as I'm not sure which I prefer—voiced or written criticism. That’s when it’s working. Recently, however, I press the button, deliver my carefully polished little speech, and only then realise that the feckless app hasn’t recorded a word. On the second attempt, naturally, I stumble, stutter, mispronounce and mutter “arr, hum” like a man possessed. The repeated failure to record was beginning to drive me mad.

Out of curiosity, I asked the other AIs on my computer—ChatGPT and Perplexity AI—if they had any recommendations for language apps. They agreed on a couple, so I thought I’d try them, especially as the priciest of all of them was still far cheaper than the one I already use.

It didn’t take long to realise I didn’t like them. Instead of a chatbot that broadly understood me and would discuss anything from rising damp to a party’s social policies, I found myself interacting with slightly smarter versions of those old Q&A machines. The apps would prompt me with scripted exchanges, reminding me of those mechanical quiz toys that pointed at the correct answer with a metal rod. Fun for a bit, but not exactly expansive or natural.

I’m sure that if these tools had existed when I first began learning Spanish, they would have been pretty useful for drilling basic interactions—What’s the weather like?, Where are you from?, What sort of music do you like?—but they were nowhere near as responsive as the conversational partner I use now. I didn't persevere with them.

So if you’re thinking of trying one of these language AI apps, my advice is to look carefully before you plump for one. Their capabilities really do vary wildly, and they offer different features which may or may not suit your specific needs.

Oh, and as to the question in the title. Of course it is. In any given month you can learn any number of phrases in 450 or 465 minutes—even in only the 420 minutes in February—but being able to repeat a few phrases isn’t really speaking a language, is it? Unless you work in advertising.