Experimental Application of the Hyperintensive Method for Entering Conversational Practice in German Using Only AI Tutors
A. K. Bigulov · Linguistics & Polyglot Studies · 2025
The article presents experimental verification of the possibility of achieving the level of entry into conversational practice in German from zero level exclusively through interaction with AI-based tutors within the framework of the author’s hyperintensive method of language learning. The author conducted a two-month (62 days) self-experiment from December 2024 to January 2025. During the experiment, the hyperintensive method was applied, adapted for conducting lessons with personalized AI tutors based on the Student Operated Lesson approach. As part of the experiment, an ecosystem of 21 specialized AI tutors was developed on the ChatGPT Plus, Google AI Studio, Claude, and ElevenLabs platforms, divided into two functional groups: academic tutors for maintaining complex educational dialogues, and conversational tutors who acted as language partners for informal communication. Throughout the experiment, the progress of conversational skills was monitored with the involvement of independent experts (teachers of German). The author conducted a quantitative linguistic analysis of transcribed dialogues using specially developed software based on the spaCy and Textstat libraries. Over the 62 days of the experiment, with a total time expenditure of 131 hours, of which 52.5 hours were devoted to targeted conversational practice with AI agents, the author achieved the level of entry into conversational practice. The results of the experiment were verified through final spontaneous conversations with six unfamiliar German speakers and two independent experts, who determined the level achieved to be B1 on the CEFR scale in terms of conversational skills. Linguistic analysis revealed the acquisition and use of 1,060 unique lemmas in spontaneous speech, progressive complication of syntactic structures (increase in dependency depth), a decrease in the number of hesitation markers, which characterizes an increase in fluency, and a decrease in readability, which indirectly indicates a complication of speech structures. The level achieved demonstrated stability during a follow-up check three months later. Specific psycholinguistic features of interaction with AI were identified, including the “uncanny valley” effect and the need for high self-discipline on the part of the learner. The experiment confirms the applicability of the hyperintensive method to learning conditions exclusively with AI tutors and the possibility of achieving functional fluency in foreign languages without the participation of human teachers. The results open up new prospects for the development of both autonomous language learning methods and hybrid language learning models that integrate the advantages of AI technologies and traditional pedagogical approaches to foreign language learning. Nevertheless, further research should focus on studying the long-term sustainability of the results achieved and optimizing human interaction with AI systems in the educational process.