hi HN! Many years ago (in 2018) I wrote a simple French-learning exercise generator in Javascript for my wife. I was looking for a way to generate as many exercises as possible for her to practice. The idea was being able to generate a huge combination of sentences and being able to transform them deterministically based on French grammar rules. The generation and transformation is rule-based (no LLMs back then).

For example, we generate (using rule-based) :

> Je mange une pomme

then we ask the engine to transform it to past and replace the pronoun:

> Je l'ai mangée

Then we compare with the user's answer.

I recently picked the project back up, thanks to AI coding tools and some free time I improved the UI, added more conventional bits (flashcards, dictation, progress tracking, etc). I kept the core of it: the rule-based sentence generator, because it allows to generate extremely fast locally and in a controlled way.

I pushed this new version on the same repository : https://github.com/Celebio/excuse-my-french

You can directly use the app here: https://excusemyfrench.org/

I hope you'll find it useful too. Very curious about your feedback, specially the onboarding part!