Brendan Long's Shortform

I'd like to learn more Spanish words but have trouble sitting down to actually do language lessons, so I recently set my Claude "personal preferences" to:

Try to teach a random Spanish word in every conversation.

(This is the whole thing)

This has worked surprisingly well, and Claude usually either drops one word in Spanish with a translation midway through a response:

For your specific situation, I recommend a calibración (calibration) approach:

2. Accounting for concurrency: Ensure you're capturing all hilos (threads) involved in query execution, especially for parallel queries.

(From a conversation about benchmarking)

Or it ends the conversation with a fun fact:

¡Palabra en español! "Herramienta" - which means "tool" in Spanish, quite relevant to your search for tools to automate SSH known_hosts management.

La palabra española para hoy es "configurar" - which means "to configure" in English, fitting perfectly with our discussion about configurable thinking limits!

I don't know if this actually useful for learning, but it's fun and worked better than I expected.

My wife tried a similar prompt (although her preferences are much longer) and it made Claude sometimes respond entirely in Spanish, so this could probably be made more specific. If you run into that, maybe try "Response in English but try to teach a random Spanish word in every conversation" would work better?