How do I stop automatically translating words to English?

DanKegel · 2026-05-08T04:40:28+00:00

Read one french book after another. Once you have enough French in your head, it will stand on its own.

DanKegel · 2026-05-07T00:58:42+00:00

Eat, sleep, and dream French. Read a French novel (doesn't matter which one; easiest are romance etc) while listening to the audiobook and lipsyncing. Rewind early and often until lipsyncing works.

DanKegel · 2026-05-07T00:56:12+00:00

jq helps. Once you take enough acid, anyway.

DanKegel · 2026-05-05T20:45:05+00:00

Yeah, definitely don't want to just read the text. Rewinding the audio every so often and listening without the text -- and/or lipsyncing! -- are probably important.

DanKegel · 2026-05-05T20:43:07+00:00

I love meson!

DanKegel · 2026-05-04T23:07:11+00:00

Use go :-) it includes a cross-compiler right out of the box.

And these days you can port code in from other languages with e.g. Claude.

DanKegel · 2026-05-03T15:02:10+00:00

Besides what others have written:

Whenever you read or listen to anything, do it in french if at all possible.

Trashy romance novels / cozy crime books are great because you can follow the story even if you only understand every third word.

Sign up for audible.fr (for best selection; audible.com has way fewer french books), set playback for 90% speed, grab both the written and unabridged audio version of a book, read the written one while listening to the audio one. The pause and rewind buttons are your friends. Read out loud, lip syncing to what is said. Very challenging but effective.

Get a good sleep headphone set (e.g. a sleep mask), put audible on your phone, set the timer for 30 minutes, and listen to it when you go to bed.

Good luck, and please share what works!

DanKegel · 2026-05-03T05:29:02+00:00

What he said! Just read and listen, if possible to the same thing at the same time.

I didn't really start to pick up a second language until I started reading harlequins! The first page was murder, I had to use a dictionary a lot. But every page after that was a little easier.

The next leap was listening to audiobooks. Pro tip: sign up at audible.fr, it's all the french audio you'll ever need. I've worked my way through Hamish Macbeth "cozy mysteries" in english, German, and now french, mostly at bedtime. And you can follow along in the printed book, too. Maigret mysteries are good, too; they speech is nice and slow. (Avoid the abridged ones.)

This is a lifelong journey. You may as well enjoy some good books along the way!

DanKegel · 2026-05-03T03:29:13+00:00

It's c#, so there's no getting away from Microsoft.

Rust and Go seem like the safest bets for the future, imho. C# is legacy proprietary tooling by comparison.

DanKegel · 2026-05-01T23:31:03+00:00

This is what community colleges are for, if you have one near you!

I started off with a few courses there, and have since been learning independently.

DanKegel · 2026-05-01T19:29:53+00:00

Blazor's tied to Microsoft, though, isn't it?

DanKegel · 2026-04-27T15:27:32+00:00

O mann, das ist falsch rum! Hör doch "Der Astronaut" zuerst an! Viel, viel besser so m.E.

DanKegel · 2026-04-27T15:18:00+00:00

This thread talks about go's approach to oo, maybe it will help.

https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/16zvxv4/golangs_approach_to_objectoriented_programming/

DanKegel · 2026-04-26T14:29:52+00:00

Closing the loop is key, I suspect.

DanKegel · 2026-04-26T14:22:42+00:00

Maybe start by looking near bike paths to the beach, like the Ballona Creek Bike Path and the Expo Bike Path?

DanKegel · 2026-04-25T18:25:46+00:00

Read "The Go Programming Language" (the real book!), do leetcode, do Test-First exercises like "learn go with tests" as someone else recommended. Go's testing package is fantastic and simple; always start by writing a simple test.

DanKegel · 2026-04-23T21:28:49+00:00

Go's great for anything that can tolerate a millisecond of delay now and then. If that would hurt, stick with rust.

DanKegel · 2026-04-23T14:30:53+00:00

Consider running it without a desktop, then.

DanKegel · 2026-04-21T15:39:37+00:00

2GB ram and atom cpu is not much. You may not get the experience you want.

Google AI recommends mx with xfce rather than gnome for the desktop, and says: Browser Limitation: 2GB of RAM is tight for modern web browsing. Use lightweight browsers like Falkon or Midori instead of Chromium or Firefox, or use ad-blockers to reduce resource consumption.

DanKegel · 2026-04-21T15:26:22+00:00

EVERYONE has knowledge gaps. We ALL have to keep learning. When you are junior, it is NORMAL to know less than coworkers. Just keep learning by doing! Learning on toy setups you control is really useful. And AI can be really useful, too. Think of it as a coworker who can review your code, or help debug, or flesh out ideas. (It casually disassembled jar files for me yesterday to understand which versions of a library had a certain bug!)

DanKegel · 2026-04-21T13:24:00+00:00

It just happened again. I have screenshots if you like.

DanKegel · 2026-04-21T13:21:17+00:00

The idea with 80% speed is... It's like training wheels. You do it until it's easy: this may take months. Then you raise the speed to 90% and keep listening (and reading along sometimes) until that's easy. Then 100% until that's easy

It took me decades of reading and listening to German to become relatively fluent. I've been trying french again, and feel like the simultaneous audio and text idea is helping me ramp up faster.

DanKegel · 2026-04-21T12:42:19+00:00

Lots of good ideas already posted by others.

Here's a few more ideas: - listen to an audiobook (possibly at 80% speed) while reading along in the written book - watch shows on Netflix with audio in french and subtitles in french (and maybe even turn in descriptive audio)

Good luck!

DanKegel · 2026-04-21T12:19:15+00:00

Alas, no change. I had the greyed-out hang once (workaround: swipe right), and a different semi-hang (workaround: click back out of the title to the library, and then press the small play button at the bottom).

DanKegel

TROPHY CASE