Dutch tutor

My Dutch textbook is written entirely in Dutch, so I set up an AI agent to tutor me from it. It explains each chapter in English first, quizzes me on the fly, and says the Dutch out loud.

The problem I had

I’m learning Dutch from a textbook that’s written entirely in Dutch. I kept needing more English around it: what an exercise was trying to teach me, and how a grammar rule works, explained in English before the book went on to teach it in Dutch.

The layout didn’t help either. The vocabulary lists sit apart from the longer dialogues, so I was constantly flipping back and forth to read one scene.

How I went about it

I didn’t want a chatbot that knows Dutch in general. I wanted a tutor that knows my book: which chapter I’m on, which words I’ve had, and what the dialogue in that chapter says. So the first job was getting my course material into text files an AI agent can read.

Two rules were there from the start. A guide opens in English, with what the chapter is trying to teach, before any Dutch. And the agent keeps the book’s text apart from anything it wrote. The course word list is sometimes loose: it gives mankeren as “to be wrong”, when it means something is the matter. In cases like that the tutor shows both.

How it works

It isn’t one pipeline. The study guides are the main piece, and a couple of features sit around them.

The main piece

Study guides

Every chapter has one. Making a guide is the only part that runs as a sequence:

CollectMy photos of the chapter's textbook pages, plus the dialogue audio and exercise questions from the course website, go into one folder.
TranscribeThe dialogue audio is transcribed on my Mac, then corrected against the book.
GlossThe dialogue is split into chunks, and each chunk gets its vocabulary.
Write the guideWhat the chapter teaches, the grammar in English, a listening review, and the exercises without the answers.

Around the guides

Voice mode

When I switch it on, the tutor speaks. For a scene from the book it plays the course's own recording. For a single word or phrase it says the Dutch in a Dutch voice, then explains it in an English one. Both voices are open-source models that run on my Mac, so the speech costs nothing.

Practice on the fly

I can ask for a quiz or a few more exercises on whatever I'm stuck on. The agent has the whole book, so it can keep to the words and grammar I've covered.

What I changed along the way

Guides that guessed at the chapter

The first guides worked from the website's audio and exercises, and had to approximate what the chapter was about. Now my photos of the textbook pages go in at the start, so a guide follows the book itself.

Hints that gave the answer away

Exercise walkthroughs now explain the grammar and the pattern, but not the answer. The official answers sit in their own labelled section.

Reading Dutch without hearing it

A few days in I added voice mode, so I can ask how a word or a line sounds.

How it’s worked out

The English context was what I was missing, and having it in front of each chapter makes the Dutch explanations much easier to follow. Not flipping between a dialogue and its word list is a small change that I notice every time.

The part I didn’t plan for is how useful it is to ask for practice on the fly. Because the agent has the whole book, I can ask for a quick quiz or a few extra exercises on whatever I’m stuck on, and they stay within the words and grammar I’ve covered.

The code isn’t public because the same repository holds the course material, which isn’t mine to share.