Category: French

In-Flight French: Building a Language App on the Fly | December 01 2025, 15:45

By the way, yesterday morning, while waiting at the gate for my flight to Miami, I quickly wrote a French language learning app using Gemini based on an idea I sketched out to a friend while driving to the airport, and then used this app during the flight.

The idea is that in an unfamiliar foreign language text, the user first marks unknown words and then sees their translations — but without the original text, and then returns to the text itself — but no longer seeing the translations. It’s as if the “dictionary was in the next room.” The hypothesis is that this method helps better memorize than when the translation is shown immediately upon clicking on a word, and when no effort is needed.

I am pleased that creating the app from scratch to the finished version took only about 35-40 minutes, and then I used it for some time during the flight, without the internet. Since all translations of all words/phrases were already made in advance.

I just deployed it on Render. It’s also nice that demonstrating the code in action was free and took another 10 minutes.

https://readandlearn.onrender.com/

Misguided Lessons with Grok: A Bilingual Blunder | August 19 2025, 23:43

Today Grok blew my mind. I say, teach me French. He says, ok, how do you say “book”? I say “le livre”. He says “wrong! la livra”. 😳The car drives itself anyway, decided to record the dialogue. He’s not convinced. At all, insists on his point. La livra and that’s it. I’m afraid Grok will teach the bad stuff in his Language Tutor mode.

I remembered a story from “Memoirs of Pushkin” by M. E. Yuzefovich, dating to 1829:

he had several books with him, including Shakespeare. One day in our tent, he translated some scenes to me and my brother. I had once studied English, but having not fully learned it, I subsequently forgot it. However, I still recognized its sounds. In Pushkin’s reading, the English pronunciation was so distorted that I suspected his knowledge and decided to test it. The next day, I invited his relative, Zakhar Chernyshev, who knew English as his native language, warned him what was going on, and called over Pushkin with Shakespeare. He willingly started translating for us. Chernyshev burst into laughter at the first words read by Pushkin: “First tell me, in which language are you reading?” Pushkin laughed in turn, explaining that he had taught himself English, and therefore he reads English letters like Latin ones. But the fact is that Chernyshev found the translation completely correct and the language understanding impeccable.”

Anna Derevenitskaya