Recently I discovered a game I can play to improve my foreign language conversation skills even though I don't have anybody to speak it with. I use it for Norwegian, but it will work with any language.

Interactive conversations in a new language are hard because you're constantly worrying about what to say and how to say it. We focus on speaking so much that we completely ignore our other responsibility: listening.

Effective listening in a conversation requires something linguists call "back-channel signalling." Think phrases like "Really?" "Oh no!" "Poor guy!" "Did he really?" They make you an active participant in the conversation without having to do any heavy lifting yourself. Every language uses them, and they're pretty easy to learn.

The game I came up with lets me practice my Norwegian back-channeling with my wife. I just use them in our English conversations. She loves it when I drop "Å nei!" or "Hva skjedde?" into our morning chat, and it lets me work on my "active listener" skills in norsk without the burden of having to follow norsk input at the same time.

I wrote this blog post about this, and included a bunch of useful back-channel phrases (that you could translate into your own target language) plus a prompt you can use to try playing the game with your favorite LLM.

I've been practicing with ChatGPT and finding it a lot more fun than I expected.

Has anyone else tried this?