Powerful Whole App Is A Blob

School French worked perfectly until I tried to buy a coffee.

My lessons must be familiar to all Brits out there: conjugate être until it’s muscle memory, role-play booking a hotel you will never book, then leave school with the comforting illusion that you “know French” in the same way you “know trigonometry”.

The first time French came in useful was a cafe in Chartres, a small town about an hour from Paris with a cathedral, nice streets, and, as far as I could tell that day, a collective commitment to not speaking English.

I walked into a cafe feeling reasonably confident: asked for coffee in my best French and apparently did very well, because the barista replied with the total. It wasn’t even a hard number. But as it arrived as one continuous noise, I instantly gave up and defaulted to the internationally recognised protocol of tapping my card and pretending I am too busy looking at my phone.

That’s the gap language apps don’t really model: not “do you know the words?”, but “can you retrieve them when a human is waiting and you’ve got three seconds before you embarrass yourself?”

More than a decade later, planning a few months in Québec, I did what I always do before a move: learn the minimum viable politeness. Hello, sorry, thank you, the numbers, and the scaffolding around “can I get...”–enough to not be a complete nuisance.

I tried the usual apps: the streaks were pristine and the charts looked like I was becoming bilingual. But in my head I was still standing in Chartres, hearing “3,90” as “three-something-or-something” and sweating directly through my self-respect.

So I built a safety net for the specific failure mode: retrieval under pressure, or just a tiny rehearsal room I could open while the kettle boiled, practise the bits that reliably go wrong, and close again.

And because I genuinely believe that constraints are important, I wrote down the rule that would make this harder than it needed to be:

If you grew up with Tamagotchis, you already understand why this was tempting.

Source: HackerNews