404 Language Not Found: Building a Tutor from Scratch (and Tears)

My family is from Morocco, specifically the city of Agadir where the main language isn’t Arabic but an Amazigh dialect called Tashelhit (or Shilha). Tashelhit is my mother tongue and I’m still learning it since I didn’t grow up in Morocco. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find resources or ways to learn online easily, so I figured I’d use AI to help me learn the language to better communicate with my family.

This demo walks through building an AI language tutor with Python and LLMs, exploring how far you can go teaching a low-resource language with minimal and/or unclassified data. The project focuses on using AI to create small lessons and exercises to allow the user to practice the language they want. I’ll walk through the prompts, backend logic, and failure cases encountered along the way.