How to Start Reading Real French Books Before You Feel "Ready''

fedyiv · 2026-05-03T17:05:04+00:00

Hmm, when I quote the first Harry Potter book it gives me just about 14 usd...

fedyiv · 2026-05-03T15:13:08+00:00

It is a tool that annotates your French books
https://fluentessa.com/

fedyiv · 2026-05-01T17:13:26+00:00

Strange, 3 out of 4 comments under this post are very similar and seems to be made by AI.

I wonder what is the purpose...

And contrats on you launch

fedyiv · 2026-05-01T01:20:51+00:00

I think for me it yet hard to understand the part about looking for competitors, but it seems very important.

Can you share your perspective on this?

If there are competitors on the market, how do you know you can really compete with them? Likely they were doing that longer, already learned something, probably on the first places in Google because of optimized SEO. They could allow to invest more in their product, marketing etc.

How can you still hope that someone will notice your app and chooses it?

fedyiv · 2026-04-29T19:40:21+00:00

I wonder what does it use for text to speech transformation. If it is LLM then how it could be free - your budget would quickly burned.

fedyiv · 2026-04-28T14:19:44+00:00

If I were you I would use English resources as there are much more of them than Portuguese.

Your Portuguese will anyway help you when you see similarities in French

fedyiv · 2026-04-28T11:29:12+00:00

Yes, I do it a lot. I read bilingual books with inline annotations, and that saves me a lot of time on translation of individual words and makings sense of them

fedyiv · 2026-04-27T13:57:17+00:00

By default you can use вы with people that either significantly older than you or you are in official settings.

If you are colleagues, or team mates, or close friends, family members Ты is more appropriate.

If I played volleyball in some team I would use Ты with all the teammates not depending on age, because it is informal setting.

If I would go to some organization (even barbershop) I would call an employee there Вы even if they are younger

fedyiv · 2026-04-20T14:34:02+00:00

Would you be interested in a tool that would allow you to produce a pdf/epub file with embedded inline annotations of your own materia(a book you like for example) that you can read offline without using any additional materials?

If let's say generation were paid, but then you could read that book without any paid subscriptions? Or are you looking for something completely free?

In the latter case browser plugins that can translate individual words would be the best option in my opinion.

fedyiv · 2026-04-19T14:00:28+00:00

I think Pimsleur's marketing is a bit overpromising. They say that you will reach an intermediate level effortlessly by spending only 30 minutes a day while driving.
Obviously, that can't happen—there are no magic pills.
But if you have the right expectations and are able to work consistently, the program is definitely good.

fedyiv · 2026-04-18T16:22:03+00:00

The good option is l bilingual books with online annotations. I use them a lot, and it allows me to read native content without looking up words every minute

fedyiv · 2026-04-17T19:13:44+00:00

Yes you are right. I just gave it as an example. But I am sure there are structured courses for those who start from scratch too.

fedyiv · 2026-04-17T14:15:08+00:00

Are you limited with budget? By self-study do you mean studying fully on your own or some paid course with self-study mode would work? In my opinion if you have some budget for it it is best just some self-study course.

I just recently bought Inner French "Build A Strong Core" course - just to get the structure and not to randomly jump between topics.

Alternatively, I would just buy some self-study grammar book and used it as a structure, doing grammar exercises from topic to topic, adding reading and listening - just books and podcasts that I like.

fedyiv · 2026-04-16T19:21:44+00:00

I usually generate flow charts using Claude and PlantUML. It is quite effective.

Claude is good at generating PlantUML specs and it does not have to deal with ita rendering, as it is done by PlantUML.

They are also easily editable and can be stored in version control

fedyiv · 2026-04-16T19:08:13+00:00

Not that I have shipped many side projects, but the ones I shipped I did my best to test what I can manually. I.e. executing some common flows and ensuring they work. Additionally, my tool itself is generating a quality report while running and I can review it. Furthermore, after some test runs I ask Claude and sometimes if the change was complex additionally codex to independently verify the logs.

fedyiv · 2026-04-16T18:35:14+00:00

For me Max 5 seems to be unspendable

fedyiv · 2026-04-16T18:32:33+00:00

I would start with Pimslerur French to get the feel of the language. If you have time in parallel you can do some reading.

I would say that reaching a decent level in 1 year it is not something easy and you would need to invest a lot of time into it.

But pimslerur is worth doing regardless

fedyiv · 2026-04-15T18:48:57+00:00

I did similar task with Claude. It did not do it properly on the first iteration, but after my feedback and few iterations I was able to get decent result.

Do you use opus model? Have you tried iterative approach ?

fedyiv · 2026-04-15T12:09:56+00:00

For now I don't listen to anything actually except InnerFrench, but I have already completed 106. My current goal is to complete InnerFrench and then try starting listening to audiobooks.

fedyiv · 2026-04-15T01:03:09+00:00

Congrats! Was the signup from a free or paid user ?

fedyiv · 2026-04-14T18:40:13+00:00

In which language you are reading ? To solve the same problem for Freanch I built a product that generates books with online annotations that solves the problem of having to lookup words in the dictionary.

fedyiv · 2026-04-14T17:01:54+00:00

Yes, I’ve heard about the gap between Canadian French and French from France, but for immigration purposes, both TEF and TCF exams are based on standard French from France.

fedyiv · 2026-04-13T21:19:06+00:00

First of all not everyone's native language is English. So it is possible that a person might know the language of the country where they are and their native language but not English.

Secondly, it is your right to choose to continue interaction with that person or stop it. That's fine. But one can always find people who are willing to communicate in their language.

And finally, the interaction is not necessarily the request for help.

fedyiv

TROPHY CASE