Hello to all fellow expats.

Life in a foreign country is always challenging, especially when language barriers are involved. Finding an apartment, understanding how the system works, talking to kindergartens and schools – all of this is easier when you know the local language.

The thing is, if you are an expat, there is a good chance that you don’t know the local language.

I live in Denmark and I’m far from fluent in Danish. It used to consume a significant portion of my daily mental energy before ChatGPT arrived and changed the way I communicate and solve tasks in Danish.

1. Get an email in Danish in my inbox.
2. Feel tired and exhausted from thoughts of dealing with it, maybe procrastinate a bit (because there is real life and I’m tired already and have no idea where to start with the email anyway and it will be time-consuming and confusing).
3. Open the email finally, copy-paste the content to Google Translate. Hope to get an understandable result.
4. Think what should I do with it, if there is any action needed from me (mental energy, time).
5. If not – archive, if yes – write an answer in English. Here sometimes I got answers back in Danish, sometimes in good English, sometimes no answer. Anyway, I’m back to my mailbox and writing an answer (time).
6. Extra time needed if my answer has to be in Danish: then I wrote an email in English, translated in Google Translate, copied-pasted in an email, made changes, and finally sent.

Wow, even writing this is long. Going through this is also long and painful. Result – some quite important messages got missed from time to time or answers were delayed. Just no mental energy to deal with that.

1. Get an email in Danish in my inbox.
2. Immediately printscreen the email.
3. Open ChatGPT, attach printscreen and give it a prompt:

“Hi, here is an email from kindergarten/commune/plumber/etc. Summarize it, let me know if there are action points and craft a polite answer if needed in A2 level of Danish.”

Here is a real life example how it looked for me this morning:

4. Read ChatGPT answer in seconds, in 90% of the cases copy-paste answer in Danish directly to email.
5. Feel calm and happy that I’m on top of things, knowing exactly what was said, what is needed from me, and that follow-up has been done.

No important information missed. Peace of mind established. Boom!

Additionally, I’m learning Danish faster by reading and understanding the responses I’m sending. This helps integrate simpler language structures into my active vocabulary.

This strategy is also immensely helpful when you’ve just moved to a new country: writing a message in a native language to a landlord to rent an apartment significantly increases your chances to have a roof over your head.

Good luck implementing this one, do it today! Such a game changer. I only wish I had this kind of help 10 years ago when I was a new, somewhat clueless expat student 🙂