Reading La Peste

2026-07-23

I was recently on vacation which finally gave me time to finish reading La Peste (The Plague), by Albert Camus, in French. Here's what it taught me about B2B SaaS:

Kidding about the B2B SaaS thing, but I really did read it all the way through in French. For context I've been studying French for a few years, having discovered that I kind of just love languages and etymology. I was starting to feel stalled, so I decided try comprehensible input, starting with reading. First I read short stories for beginners, then for intermediate learners, and then one day decided to go whole-hog and pick a real book, by a real French author, written for native French speakers.

La Peste was, and still is, way above my current level. It's poetic and literary with long, intricate run-on sentences. It is also at times quite bleak. I used translation help throughout, a fact I'm not ashamed to admit. But by the end, I was probably reading 70-80% unassisted. For as challenging as it was, I really enjoyed the poetic writing. I own Mr. Camus an apology, though, as I got very little out of much of the book. When you're focusing 100% of your intellect on just pure semantic decoding and comprehension, higher order thoughts about plots, themes, and subtext just go out the fenêtre.

But what I really want to talk about is Chouette, my custom-made AI language learning agent who helped me through this process. Chouette is a French word for owl, but also a French slang word that means something like, "cool" or "great". C'est si chouette, y'all! To be honest, Chouette doesn't do much an out-of-the-box AI service couldn't do. He has memory, chats with me via a self-hosted Matrix instance, and has a scheduler so he can send me a vocab word-of-the-day every day at 6PM. In Chouette's system prompt I explained that I'm Bob, an English-speaking French language learner, currently practicing intensive reading, working through La Peste.

And because I specifically mentioned La Peste in the system prompt, Chouette was OBSESSED with La Peste. Chouette mentioned it in nearly every interaction and every vocabulary word had something to do with La Peste. Eventually, this got annoying so I updated the system prompt to explain that I am doing intensive reading, but did not mention specifically what I was reading.

A few days later, I ask Chouette to help me understand a sentence construction I hadn't seen before. Chouette dutifully walks me through it. As it turns out, Large Language Models are pretty good at language; who'd have thought? Then Chouette asks me what the passage was from. I answer La Peste. And Chouette commits that fact to memory and IMMEDIATELY becomes re-obsessed with La Peste again. Honestly, it was so funny to me that I let it slide and I now have quite a portfolio of bleak and oppressive vocabulary words-of-the-day.

I've since moved on to L'homme aux Circels Bleus by Fred Vargas, from one of Chouette's recommendations for a bit of lighter reading post-Peste. In many ways it's easier to read. Sentences are generally shorter and use more common vocabulary. In some ways it's harder. Constructions are less formal, so less familiar to me, and the writing includes more idioms and informal language I haven't encountered as much. But I'm enjoying it.

My next step is to continue to read, but also work a bit more on listening and speaking. So I vibed up a tiny reading / listening app: https://language.bobdavidson.dev/. The idea is you copy/paste a story into the system (such as from Fabulang), it splits it into sentences, and then you work through the story, sentence-by-sentence. First you hear the sentence, then you see the sentence. It's using built-in browser text-to-speech, so I recommend using Chrome, but I have to give a nod to Firefox for having the most hilarious TTS, which reads the French text as if it were English, a bit like Brad Pitt's character saying "Buongiorno" in Inglourious Basterds. If this interests you, feel free to use it. It's completely self-contained and runs entirely in the browser. A word of warning: while it kinda/sorta supports all the languages your browser supports, the sentence splitting logic is geared heavily towards French punctuation. Your mileage may vary.

I could ramble on about languages, etymology, and language learning all day, mais je dois m'arrêter. Thanks for reading this long language rant no one asked for, and sorry about the B2B sass earlier. Get it?! Salut!

Bob Davidson | 2026 | RSS