I built my French tutor, and became my own trickiest user

I learned French the normal way first: an exchange semester at INSA Lyon, and a DELF B2. Then I did the abnormal thing: I built my own tutor.

It started as a personal RAG project — retrieval over material I actually wanted to learn from, prompt engineering so corrections explain rather than just fix, small animations to make practice feel less like homework. I was the main user, which is a gift and a trap. A gift because the feedback loop is instant: if a session feels boring or a correction feels wrong, I know before any metric does. A trap because I am one very specific user, fluent in my own tool's assumptions.

So when I decided to turn it public, I didn't trust myself as a sample. I started with research: I read what real learners complain about on social media, watched people who were nothing like me use it, and collected the edge cases I had been quietly avoiding. Then I iterated. The version that exists now looks little like the first one — which, by now, I've learned to expect.

Building a tool for a skill you are still learning is a strange loop: every improvement to the tutor is a test of what you actually understand about learning. I recommend it to anyone. You get a project, and a mirror.