# Show HN: Excuse My French – a French-learning exercise generator

> Source: <https://excusemyfrench.org/>
> Published: 2026-08-20 15:54:50+00:00

hi HN! Many years ago (in 2018) I wrote a simple French-learning exercise generator in Javascript for my wife. I was looking for a way to generate as many exercises as possible for her to practice. The idea was being able to generate a huge combination of sentences and being able to transform them deterministically based on French grammar rules. The generation and transformation is rule-based (no LLMs back then).

For example, we generate (using rule-based) :

> Je mange une pomme

then we ask the engine to transform it to past and replace the pronoun:

> Je l'ai mangée

Then we compare with the user's answer.

I recently picked the project back up, thanks to AI coding tools and some free time I improved the UI, added more conventional bits (flashcards, dictation, progress tracking, etc). I kept the core of it: the rule-based sentence generator, because it allows to generate extremely fast locally and in a controlled way.

I pushed this new version on the same repository : [https://github.com/Celebio/excuse-my-french](https://github.com/Celebio/excuse-my-french)

You can directly use the app here: [https://excusemyfrench.org/](https://excusemyfrench.org/)

I hope you'll find it useful too. Very curious about your feedback, specially the onboarding part!

Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49376376](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49376376)

Points: 2

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