lngkata

I've been struggling to learn a foreign language. Every language learning app is frankly terrible. I tried Duolingo and a host of other apps, and they eventually either frustrate me or bore me and more importantly, I wasn't learning. The others that look promising don't have my target language, Brazilian Portuguese.

The only method that I tried that seemed to work a little bit was the Michel Thomas Method... but it's in European Portuguese ^[1]

I also know it's not enough to engage with the material once; I need to revisit it periodically. In other words, spaced repetition.

I've given up on finding the right application. As I'm genuinely frustrated by the apps I've used, I know the pain points others face. I know what I want, so why not roll my own?

As a busy person with not much time for side projects, I didn't really fancy writing a whole app just to try out some hypothesis I had about engaging ways to learn a foreign language. I could vibe code it. But even when you are paying attention and using LLMs, they still tend to enter doom loops where technical debt slows down development to a halt.

Why not just take bits of tried and tested pieces of software and put them together? So I prototyped a custom language learning app in one hour without any vibe coding, and it works pretty great so far. If I use it and find it helpful, then maybe I'll build something more polished.