@nt

big milestone for me: I've learned 1000 Chinese words/sentences over the past 6 months. for the first 2 months, I used a bunch of off-the-shelf apps - all of which were in some way frustrating/annoying to use. so I built my own. Polylang is an app that I've been perfecting based on daily use. I've been using it on average 30 minutes every single day, with over 13k exercises completed just on my account. it's been helping me progress super fast. you import your vocabulary, automatically generate images and pronunciation audio, then work through flashcard exercises which are structured and timed automatically to improve retention and recall. once you get to a certain stage in practice, Polylang starts automatically remixing your vocabulary to serve unique generated sentences into daily practice. what's even cooler is that I own all of the data, and I built the app to satisfy the inner data nerd within me. I have full vocabulary tracking, with each item storing a model of how well my brain remembers it. I can view and track my progress in a very detailed way - it feels a lot like whoop or strava, but for language learning. I've offered in the past for friends to use it, but this is really the kind of thing that requires a serious daily commitment as it's pretty hardcore. but I've tuned it so that if you do show up every day, you basically end up learning 2-3x faster than the average learning, whilst spending less total time in practice. honestly it's worth vibe coding your own personal software. this probably took me 3-4 days of combined effort to build and refine, but it's absolutely perfect for me - and I don't really care if it doesn't suit anyone else but me. this cost me maybe $300-400 in tokens to build, but runs on maybe $2-3/month and I could probably optimise it to make it cheaper. so much better than spending $20/month on an app built for some target average demographic and facing the daily frustration of features that don't behave exactly how you want them to.

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