Learning Spanish with Worksheets

I developed a basic service to reinforce my Spanish learning regularly, which generates Spanish homework and then emails it to me every two days. I didn't want to look at that stupid green owl on my phone nor maintain daily streaks, so this form of accountability was ideal.

I learned French in school; I was fine at it. It turned out to be the subject I spent the least amount of attention on, so once I left school, my knowledge completely disappeared. The same thing with Irish, unfortunately. I learned it for fourteen years, and it met the same demise. You can blame the Irish education system, and a lot of people might do, but the real problem was practice. Or the lack of it. With Spanish, I didn't want to repeat that pattern, so the homework idea made sense.

The app itself is boring. It's a Django REST framework app deployed on Railway.com. A GitHub Action fires a CRON job every second day, which wakes up the app, generates a prompt from rotating topics to send to Deepseek AI, and then emails the result through Mailgun. The email consists of four sections of ten sentences each of the past, present, future, and mixed vocabulary in natural dialogue thanks to the LLM.
For example (try it out yourself!):

Once I got it working, I showed my girlfriend and she liked the idea too. I decided then to add the functionality to send to more than just me, with a User Recipient model for each user.

Since moving to Barcelona, Spanish is a constant presence in my life. I've put a lot of effort into learning Spanish, with my main goal being to simply improve. No end goal in sight, just practicing and failing, and we'll see if I become fluent. I've tried a few things: Using Anki flashcards every day, watching Spanish movies like todo sobre mi madre, and changing my mobile apps to Spanish. All useful, but no match with actually speaking. I've done over sixty hours of lessons on Preply, a company here in the city that built a platform for one-on-one lessons with native teachers. It's much closer to what actually happens in a shop or a bar than any app exercise.

Early on, I got hit hard by the Dunning-Kruger effect. I learned a handful of tidy sentences and assumed the world would cooperate. That didn't work out well because people spoke fast and didn't follow my script. The more Spanish I learn, the more unknown unknowns reveal themselves and the automatic homework exists because of that gap. It puts the language in my lap even on days when I'd rather avoid it.

Catalan has crept in alongside Spanish. It is the native language, so you hear it everywhere and I love the way it sounds. I respect the tenacity with which they will protect it here, something we Irish could learn from. Now that my Spanish base is less shaky, I'm starting to focus on speaking Catalan properly, and living here makes that feel natural rather than forced.

For now, the emails come every two days, an automated barrier ensuring Spanish doesn't meet the same quiet demise as my Irish and French.

Project Link