French Learning Pipeline

A personal phrase-bank tool for spoken French. Ingests content (subtitles, YouTube videos, pasted text/news), tracks new vocabulary in a personal dictionary, and generates ready-to-use French phrases (conversation starters, reactions to news, opinions, descriptions of what you're consuming) with TTS audio, pushed live into Anki.

See /home/joe/.claude/plans/tranquil-juggling-canyon.md for the full design plan.

Setup

1. Install AnkiConnect in Anki (Tools → Add-ons → Get Add-ons… → code 2055492159 → restart Anki). Verify:

   curl -s http://localhost:8765 -X POST -d '{"action": "version", "version": 6}'
   

2. Create the virtualenv and install dependencies:

   python3 -m venv .venv
   .venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
   .venv/bin/python -m spacy download fr_core_news_sm
   

3. Copy .env.example to .env and fill in your ElevenLabs API key and chosen voice ID. Never commit .env.
4. Initialize the database:

   sqlite3 data/french.db < french_learning/dictionary/schema.sql
   

5. Create the Anki deck + note type:

   .venv/bin/python scripts/setup_anki.py
   

Usage

• Drop a subtitle file, YouTube URL, or pasted text and run /process-content <source> in Claude Code to extract vocab and draft phrases.
• Or just ask in conversation ("how do I say...") and Claude will draft a phrase directly.
• scripts/generate_audio.py — generate TTS for approved phrases.
• scripts/push_to_anki.py — push phrases with generated audio into Anki.
• french_learning/tui — browse/curate the phrase bank and dictionary.