# The &parley; Handbook

Ewald Arnold

    &Ewald.Arnold.mail;

Eric Bischoff

    &Eric.Bischoff.mail;

Reviewer
Anne-Marie Mahfouf

    &Anne-Marie.Mahfouf.mail;

Frederik Gladhorn

    &Frederik.Gladhorn.mail;

1999 2000 2001 2002 &Ewald.Arnold;
2005 &Anne-Marie.Mahfouf;
2007 &Frederik.Gladhorn;
&FDLNotice;
2007-10-01
0.9.0

&parley; is a vocabulary trainer. It helps you to memorize your vocabulary, for example when you are trying to learn a foreign language. &parley; is not limited to language learning but supports a multitude of subjects.

KDE KVocTrain Parley vocabulary training learning

## Introduction

### What is it?

&parley; is a vocabulary trainer. It helps you to memorize your vocabulary, for example when you are trying to learn a foreign language. You can create your own files with the words you need or select from a great variety of files on its homepage. There you can find files containing language vocabulary and also anatomy, music, geography, chemistry or exam preparation.

&parley; is very flexible and uses the flash card learning approach. It automatically keeps track of your progress and lets you sort your vocabulary as you wish. But unlike real flash cards you can use different learning methods with &parley;

Flashcards contain expressions on the front side and their translation on the back. You start with a pile of cards. If you know the translation on a card, you can put it into a second pile of cards. If you fail, you keep it in the first one to try again later.

&parley;s main focus is not to teach you grammar or other sophisticated things. However, there are some exercise forms which may help you in this matter.

## Quick Start to &parley;

&parley; main window
&parley; main window

For a start you could download vocabulary files directly from the Internet using File Download New Vocabularies....

Get Vocabularies dialog
Get Vocabularies dialog

Here, for example, I choose the file "Basic vocabulary German-English" with a click on the Install button in the dialog, the file is saved in your home folder `~/share/apps/kvtml`.

The Basic vocabulary German-English file
The vocabulary file

On the left of the main window you see a list of lessons. To select a lesson for training tick the box in front of it. After selecting one or more lessons let's start learning by clicking Start Practice in the toolbar.

Written Practice Dialog
Written Practice Dialog

After starting the practice &parley; asks you to enter a translation. Let's assume that you are not too sure about it. Just click once on Show More and the first letter of the word appears in the entry box. Click again and the second letter shows up. If you prefer to see the word completely, click on the Show Solution button. If you want to check your answer click on Verify. To ignore words or to mark them as known without entering them, click on the Skip (Do Not Know) or Skip (I know It) buttons respectively. In the progress box you can see the number of words you have answered correctly and the seconds remaining for your answer. You can configure this option on the Advanced page in the Configure Practice settings.

In case you find writing the words too hard, why not try a multiple choice test? After stopping the practice click on Configure Practice and choose a different practice method. You can also change the order of languages.

Configure Practice Dialog
Configure Practice Dialog

This is how a Multiple Choice test looks like:

Multiple Choice Practice Dialog
Multiple Choice Practice Dialog

## Using &parley;

### Overview

This is the main window of &parley;. It consists of two areas: the lesson list in the left third of the window and the current vocabulary list in the other two thirds.

Screenshot

#### The lesson list

The lesson list on the left shows all lessons in your vocabulary file. If you mark a lesson, it will become the current one. In this case it is survival training.

The ticked box left of the name of each lesson indicates that it is to be included in the practice. You may choose as many lessons for a test as you like.

#### The vocabulary list

Depending on your selection, one or more lessons are displayed on the right side of the screen.

If you mark a range of entries to work with, their background color changes. Many editing functions work for multiple entries simultaneously.

The color in the column with the original will vary if you have two or more columns with translations. If the cursor is in one of the translations the color represents its grade to the original. See section entry dialog for more on this.

#### The search bar

The search bar is located above the vocabulary table.

You can use the search bar to filter your vocabulary. If you type in a string, you will only see entries with this string in the vocabulary table.

Screenshot

#### The status bar

The status bar is located at the bottom of the main window. It is empty at the moment.

### Available file formats

&parley; can read and write the following file formats:

- its native xml-style document type with the extension `.kvtml`.

  If you want to share documents with others, use this format as it is the only file format that is capable of storing all properties in &parley;.

- simple text files with special delimiters between the entries which are also used by simple database programs. The extension is `.csv` in this case.

  There are a lot of files on the Internet which use the tab stops or one or two colons to separate the languages. To select this separator use the tab for setting the Open/Save options in the General page of the Configure - &parley; dialog.

&parley; reads the first few bytes of a file and guesses its file format. If none of the special types like `.kvtml` or `.lex` are recognized, it will try the `.csv` format.

### Available word types

&parley; has the following internal word types. Furthermore every document can contain user defined types.

Type name | Description | Example
--- | --- | ---
Adjective | describing the properties of things or persons | expensive, good
Adverb | tells you when, how, where .. something is happening | today, strongly
Article definite article indefinite article |  | a, an the
Conjunction | serves to bind words or sentences | and, but
Proper Noun | names of a person, a creature, sometimes a thing | Big Ben, Tom
Noun male female neutral | names of things, feelings | table, coffee (there is no distinction of genders in English)
Numeral ordinal cardinal | counting or numbering of things | first, second one, two
Phrase | special combination of words | to kill two birds with one stone
Preposition | tells you about the relationship or location | behind, between
Pronoun Possessive pronoun Personal pronoun | tells about the ownership of something stands as a replacement for a noun | my, your you, she
Interrogatory | introduces questions | who, what
Verb regular verb irregular verb | who is doing something or what is happening | to cook, cooked, cooked to go, went, gone

### How should I learn?

The usual way to learn with &parley; is to use one of its practice modes.

It keeps track of your knowledge of the expressions by assigning them to one of seven levels ranging from Level 1 to Level 7.

Several options are implemented which can be configured in the dialog for the practice options.

- To keep the amount of expressions in a query in a reasonable range, you may restrict it to one lesson and/or a certain word type. Research in psychology of learning suggests that the number of entries in one lesson should not exceed about 30.

- The range of a query can depend on the current grade, the number of queries and the last query date.

- Learning is efficient if you repeat new vocabulary in growing intervals. There is a blocking and expiring mechanism for that case, so that you are not obliged to modify the settings after each cycle. Correctly answered expressions are blocked at least for the given time and will only be shown after the period of time defined as expiration time.

- For your personal taste or just for becoming acquainted with a new word, you may choose a query that shows the solution together with several other randomly chosen words. This is called multiple choice query.

- Special word types need special queries. For this reason there are queries for the conjugation of verbs, comparison form of adjectives and the articles of nouns.

When querying, &parley; shows the expressions in random order until you confirm all as known. If you did not select a special lesson, all lessons are queried one after the other.

When you leave &parley;, expressions left in a running query are stored accordingly. At a later restart you can resume the query (this does not apply to special queries with verbs, articles and comparisons at the moment). Those expressions are marked with a green check mark in the main view.

## Sharing files and downloading dictionaries

### Contributing your files to &parley;

If you have created a kvtml file, please send an email to &Anne-Marie.Mahfouf.mail; with the file attached and I will put the file in the contributed kvtml files on the &kde;-Edu website so other people will be able to use it.

If you modify existing files or create new files based on copyrighted material you must ask the author for permission. Even taking literal examples from schoolbooks might be problematic! The files must be licensed under a free license, please indicate it in your mail when you send the file.

### Downloading and installing existing files

You can easily get and install existing files using the File Get New Vocabularies... menu, provided you have an Internet connection. The following dialog is then displayed:

Get New Vocabularies... dialog
Get New Vocabularies... dialog

Choose the file you want to get and click the Install button. The file is then downloaded from its location on the Internet, saved on your hard disk and opened in &parley; current window.

The files you download are saved in your home folder `~/share/apps/kvtml`.

### Other dictionaries on the web

- If you are German an want to learn English (or vice versa) you can download the monthly vocabulary list provided by the German magazine Spotlight-Online.

  The &parley; distribution contains an executable called `spotlight2kvtml` to transform those lists in kvtml format. The original files come as &Windows; Word DOC-files so you have to save them as ANSI-TXT files before starting conversion. StarOffice or kword can do this job.

  `spotlight2kvtml` needs the 3 parameters filename, month and year and produces a file in the same folder with the same name and the extension `kvtml`:

  ``spotlight2kvtml` 0199.txt 01 99`

- Thanks to a contribution by Andreas Neuper you can download files from Langenscheidt. This is a german site and contains files in several languages. This distribution contains his perl script `langen2kvtml` to transform those lists in kvtml format.

  `langen2kvtml` needs only the original filename as parameter and tries to extract as much information as possible from the source file. For example is keeps the lesson names, conjugations and articles.

  It produces a file in the same folder with the same name and the extension `kvtml`.

- Files in kvtml format are available at:

  - &kde;-Edu Contributed Learning Files

- Dictionaries in ascii-format are for example available at:

  - ftp.gwdg.d e/pub/misc/dictionary/english/words.gz (approx. 1035 kB)

- Dictionaries from the *Quick project in CSV format but encoded in UTF8 so you should have all characters rendered correctly. The files are available from its download section. They are in compressed &Windows; `.EXE` format so you have to use unzip to extract the files.

If you know another source please tell me to include it here.

### Translator applications

If you do not want to learn but just need quick translations of expressions in larger dictionaries you might be unhappy with &parley; if your computer doesn't have much memory and MHz. A 150000 entry file consumes about 60M and takes ages to load if your system is short of memory.

In this case you might want to try one of the following:

- kdsing (&kde;).

- steak/xsteak (console/X).

- Ding (TCL).

## Interesting links

### Similar projects

You might also want to try one of the other vocabulary trainers I have found (sorted by the time when I found them):

- &kwordquiz; (&kde;)

- SVT (console)

### Other interesting links

Maybe you are interested in the one or the other links I found while working on &parley;.

- &GNU; Unifont Projekt

- SEUL Educational Projects

- Reference and Introduction to Phonetic Symbols

- The International Phonetic Association

## Configuring &parley;

### &parley; settings for all documents.

TODO

## Credits and License

### Thanks

I'd like to thank the following people personally for their contribution to &parley;:

- Peter Hedlund who kept KVocTrain alive and started the KDE 4 port which eventually would become Parley

- David Capel

- Avgoustinos Kadis

- Daniel Laiding

- Johannes Simon

I also want to thank all the other unnamed persons, especially the whole &kde; team, for their help, constructive criticism, suggestions or bug-reports.

### Copyright

&parley; copyright 2007-2008 &Frederik.Gladhorn; &Frederik.Gladhorn.mail;

Documentation copyright 2007-2008 &Frederik.Gladhorn; &Frederik.Gladhorn.mail;

&underFDL; &underGPL;

## Installation

### How to obtain &parley;

Please visit the &parley; homepage to learn how to obtain Parley.

&install.intro.documentation;
&documentation.index;