So why am I writing posts in English? It started when I came across a video — this guy doing cross-border e-commerce was talking about an English learning method. One of the things he mentioned was writing down your everyday self-talk, then handing it to a large language model to translate into everyday American English, and then reading it over and over. I thought it was pretty interesting, so I decided to write a diary entry every day, translate it into English with DeepSeek, and save it on my blog so I can read it whenever I have time.
Actually, I've been using Duolingo to study English this whole time, and the results have been... hard to describe. I've saved the reading sections from Duolingo and occasionally read through them, but those dialogues were written by other people after all — they don't really match my own daily life. I figured writing down my own thoughts, translating them into English, and then reading them might work better.
Right now I write it in Obsidian first, then copy it over to the DeepSeek web version, use a prompt to have it give the diary a title first, then translate it into English. It's a bit of a hassle. There's actually a more convenient way — spend five minutes using DeepSeek harness to add a feature to the blog's create-post page that automatically converts the diary into English through the API, saving all the copy-pasting.
But I'm not planning to do that for now. For one, I don't know how long this random idea is gonna last. And two, using the API costs money — why pay for the API when I can just use the web version for free?
(Translated with DeepSeek)