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I've spent years trying to learn French and Spanish.
I understand a fair bit of both. I'm terrible at speaking either one, and the reason is dumb: I really dislike being bad at things, so I avoid the part where I'd be bad at it out loud.
That's a hard problem to fix with an app.
My partner Kevin's family is Québécois, and French is the language at the table. I’d like to get good enough at French that when I'm with them, I can participate in the conversation.
KEVIN'S FAMILY AND MY PARENTS, QUÉBEC, SEPTEMBER.
I’ve used Duolingo for years, but it just doesn’t quite do the trick. In general, but especially for Québec French.
So I built myself something that does.
I'm not a developer. I've never written an app, and I can't read most of the code that runs the one I built.
I described what I wanted in plain English, Claude wrote it, and when something came out wrong I said so and it fixed that.
The whole loop took less than an afternoon to create something usable.
If there's something you keep working around because no product does quite what you need, you can probably have your own version of it in an afternoon too.
Apps teach France French, and that isn't the French I need
Duolingo’s French isn’t wrong, it’s just not as useful for the dinner table I'm sitting at.
In Quebec, déjeuner is breakfast, dîner is lunch and souper is dinner. In France those slide one meal later, so déjeuner is lunch. Every app I tried taught me the French version, which means I'd have been agreeing to a lunch that the other person scheduled for breakfast.
But it goes much further than that.
Chu pleine is what you say in Quebec when you've eaten enough. Say the same thing in France and you've announced you're pregnant… or drunk. Hopefully the context makes it clear which!
And Kevin isn't my petit ami in Québec. He's my chum, and I'm la blonde de Kevin, which is how his family would refer to me whether or not I'm blonde.
(I’m not, and this did seriously confuse me at the beginning.)
None of that is in Duolingo’s French lessons. There are only so many Québécois learners, and a company building for the majority is definitely not going to focus on Québec French.
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
So I built the app instead
My friend Ed had written a spec for a language trainer he wanted. I took it, sat down with Claude, and had a working version by the end of the afternoon.
It's one file. It does exactly what I need and nothing else:
The Quebec version is the headline on every card, with standard French as the secondary note, because I want to recognize what's actually said to me.
Everything uses tu (the familiar form of you), which is what Kevin’s family uses.
It grades my speaking through the phone's microphone, so the part I avoid is the part it makes me do.
Cards move through spaced repetition boxes, coming back after 1, 3, 7, 16 and 35 days depending on how well I know them.
Every week it gets a new pack of cards built from what I was actually doing that week, which makes learning a lot more relevant and exciting than a textbook unit about going to the post office.
A LISTENING CARD. TOPIC: KEVIN’S MOM’S GARDEN
It started at 162 cards across 14 categories. It's at 302 now.
The sync between my laptop and my phone runs on a tiny database Kevin suggested so I can keep my progress going no matter where I’m learning.
Software with one user doesn't need a market
I have a lot of problems that are too specific for anyone to build software for.
This is one.
Another one is that coliving spaces are listed all over the internet and almost none of those listings tell you the things that decide whether you can actually live somewhere, so in July I built a website that does.
Each of those was about a day's work.
Even last year these would both have been projects I never started.
Software you build for one person doesn't need a market, a name, a landing page, or anyone else's agreement that the problem is real.
It just needs to work for you.
In my opinion the building is the easy half now. The hard half is noticing that the annoying thing you've worked around for three years is a thing you could just fix.
What it fixed, and what it didn't
I'm not going to tell you it fixed me. I still don't like being bad at things, and I'm still bad at speaking.
What it did fix is that I stopped needing to decide to practice. Last week I added a reminder that goes off on my phone once a day if I haven't studied yet, and that one change has done more than any feature I built in July.
It's also not finished, which is the normal state of a tool with one user. I keep making it better because I'm the only person I have to convince.
It's yours too, if you want it
It's here: french.undefaultedlabs.com
A few things worth knowing before you start:
Your progress saves automatically in whatever browser you open it in. There's no account and no sign-up.
To use it on both your phone and your laptop, open Settings on the device you've been studying on, hit ✨ Generate new code under Sync, then enter that same code on the other device. Do it in that order. The device that generates is the one whose progress wins. Turning sync on does mean your deck sits in a database I run, so if you'd rather it stay on your own machine, skip that step.
If you'd rather keep a copy, Settings has ⬇ Export backup, which hands you a file.
It's built for Québécois, so if you're headed to Paris this is the wrong tool. But you can build yourself one targeted at exactly what you're trying to learn.
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YOUR TURN
Hit reply and tell me the most specific problem you'd build yourself a tool for. The more specific the better, that's the whole point!
🎁 Also: a reader sent back two Alaska Lounge passes he couldn't use, and both expire September 30. Reply with "lounge" and the first two replies get them.
— Caroline
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ON THE GROUND
📍 46.3487° N, 72.5323° W — my dad sold paper for much of his career, so we couldn't miss taking him here.
🛶 Current vibe: One more day next year
🌍 Countries visited: 130 / 193
🗺️ The rest of my pins: the Vetted Places Map, 1,222 places in 107 countries
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