For the last eight months, I have been learning Turkish. It’s hard. Mostly because it’s much more distant from English than any language I have studied previously (French, Latin, Danish, Dutch).

When you are learning a language, sometimes you encounter tasks for which you need to develop automaticity (i.e. muscle memory, but for your mind). For example: word endings; choosing the correct preposition; counting.

To develop automaticity, you need a way to rapidly and repeatedly give yourself problems to solve. And, ideally, to get instantaneous feedback on your answer. But the resources are often scant. Perhaps there are only 5-10 examples in your textbook. Or you find a set of digital flashcards, but they are mixed with irrelevant content.

But you can program a computer! It’s not exactly hard to build yourself an interactive quiz. So you should do that, and customise it exactly to your needs.

It turns out I am not the first person to have come to this conclusion and we are now calling this Personal Software. Apparently I’m meant to be letting an LLM generate it for me, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet.

I have started collecting my tools for learning Turkish. It’s no MathAcademy (aside: what they are doing is really cool), but these are mine.