Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Ewald Arnold
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
This handbook describes kvoctrain version 0.8.0. kvoctrain is a little utility to help you train your vocabulary, when you are trying to learn a foreign language.
Table of Contents
Introduction
kvoctrain is a little utility to help you train your vocabulary, when you are trying to learn a foreign language. You can create your own database with the words you need.
It is intended as a replacement for index (flash) cards.
You probably remember flashcards from school. The teacher would write the original expression on the front side of the card and the translation on the back. Then look at the cards one after another. If you knew the translation, you could put it away. If you failed, you put it back to try again.
kvoctrain is not intended to teach you grammer or other sophisticated things. This is and probably will stay beyond the scope of this application.
Usage
As you can see below, the entries of the vocabulary are arranged similar to a spreadsheet. Each column represents an expression or word in one language or some other information. The leftmost column contains the name of the lesson this entry belongs to. The second describes the state of the line and the third is always the original word. The others to the right of it represent the respective translations.
![[main view]](mainview.png)
In the picture above, you can see that several properties of the vocabulary have a visual representation:
colors show the grade (Level 1 to 7) of your knowledge
A green check mark in the second colums means that this line is in use for a query (when you did not finish last time) whereas a red cross appeares when you deactivated the line.
if you mark a range of entries to work with, they appear with a different background.
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.
Of course it is also possible to use it as an ordinary dictionary and lookup manually.
On the bottom of the main window you also see the status line which usually contains the three areas that show important properties of the current expression if available:
- T:
the type of this word
- P:
how to pronunce this expression. If you have a font installed, that contains IPA-characters you can also use the characters from the phonetic alphabet. See more about this in the according options dialog page.
- R:
your personal remarks
While kvoctrain is loading, saving a large file or otherwise busy doing something time consuming, you will see a progress bar in this status line.
Inline editing
There are two modes that allow you to modify the content of the cells in the main view. You can select the desired mode in the options menu.
- Inline editing enabled
When this mode is enabled you can modify the lesson or the state of a table row by selecting it from a listbox. The listbox appears after clicking on it with the mouse or pressing space while the cursor is in the cell.
To modify a word or an expression just start typing and press Return when you have finished.
Please note: You can't invoke the entry dialog window in this mode.
- Inline editing disabled
When inline editing is disabled you must press F2 to open a listbox or an edit field to make you changes.
To invoke the entry dialog window just press Return when the cursor in the cell or double click on it.
Using the keyboard
I tried to optimize the work flow for the use with the keyboard. So all of the important functions are reachable this way.
- Tab
The cursor is moved to the smart search input field. If you start typing an expression in this field, kvoctrain will search the next best match after each key. The cursor in the vocabulary is then moved to this location.
If you press Return it will move to the next match.
If you only want entries that match from the beginning of the expression you must press Ctrl+Return.
Pressing Shift+Tab or Tab will move back to the vocabulary.
- Left Arrow
The cursor in the vocabulary is moved one column to the left. If it has reached the leftmost column, nothing happens.
- Right Arrow
The cursor in the vocabulary is moved one column to the right. If it has reached the rightmost column, nothing happens.
- Up Arrow
The cursor in the vocabulary is moved one row upwards. If it has reached the topmost row, nothing happens.
- Down Arrow
The cursor in the vocabulary is moved one row downwards. If it has reached the bottommost row, nothing happens.
- Page Up
The cursor in the vocabulary is moved one page (the amount of visible lines -1) upwards. If the cursor would exceed the first possible row, nothing happens.
- Page Down
The cursor in the vocabulary is moved one page downwards. If the cursor would exceed the last possible row, nothing happens.
- Enter
Invoke dialog for modification of this entry.
- Ins
Invokes a dialog to enter a new original expression and appends a new row with this expression at the end of the vocabulary. The cursor is moved to the end of the vocabulary afterwards.
If you have selected smart appending you are prompted to enter originals and their translations until you stop by pressing the ESC key.
- Del
After confirmation of a safety dialog, the currently selected row or selection is removed from the vocabulary.
- + or -
By pressing Ctrl and one of the two number pad keys, + or -, you can choose the previous or next item in the combo box determining the current lesson. If you don't have a number pad you may also use the normal + or - keys.
Using the mouse
Double clicking an expression in the table will invoke the dialog to modify this entry.
Left mouse click in of the header buttons will sort this column in ascending order. The next click will sort in descending order. When the colum is sorted you can see a triangle in the button that shows the direction.
Keeping pressed the left mouse button for about 1 second in on of the table header buttons will pop up its header menu.
Working on selections
It is possible to mark a range of expressions. You can then modify one or more properties from the selection or save them as a new file.
If you keep the Ctrl key pressed while clicking on an entry, the whole row is marked for further processing. A click on a marked entry will remove this selection.
When you additionally press a Shift key when clicking on an entry, the selection will be extended from the current entry to the point where the cursor was previously.
You invoke the edit dialog to modify the selection by pressing Return. In this case the dialog appears differently. Some properties are disabled. For example it does not make sense to edit the expression itself or the remark of a whole range.
All selectable fields are empty at the beginning to represent the unmodified state. Once you have modified a property there will be contents in its field and only those properties are altered in your selection when you confirm the dialog.
Available file formats
kvoctrain 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 one as it is the only file format that is capable of containing all the properties in kvoctrain.
Vocabulary files from vocabbox which is the leanest vocabulary trainer I know. I recommend this application if you need a really compact one.
Files created by Vocabulary Trainer This is an application for Microsoft® Windows®. It uses the file extension lex. Unfortunately the link to the original files at Compuserve is dead but there may still be files available elsewhere so I kept it.
Simple text files with special delimiters between the entries which are also used by simple database programs. The extension is csv in this case. kvoctrain also detects if those files are encoded in UTF8 since such files are also available to preserve the correct characters, see more about this in the section about encodings and charsets.
There are a lot of dictionaries on the internet which use the tabular character or one or two colons to separate the different languages. To select this separator use the dialog for setting the clipboard options.
kvoctrain reads the first few bytes from a file and makes a guess about the file format. When none of the special types like kvtml or lex are recognized, it uses the csv format.
Available word types
kvoctrain has the following internal word types. Furthermore every document can contain user derfined 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
|
| |
Conjunction | serves to bind words or sentences | and, but |
Proper Noun | name of a person, a creature, sometimes a thing | Big Ben, Tom |
Noun
| naming of things, feelings | table, coffee (english does not distinguish here) |
Numeral
| counting or numbering of things |
|
Phrase | special combination of words | to kill two birds with one stone |
Preposition | tells you about the relationship or location | behind, between |
Pronoun
|
|
|
Interrogatory | introduces questions | who, what |
Verb
| who is doing something or what is happening |
|
About charsets, encodings, unicode and such strange things
Every human-readable text file is represented by a sequence of “bytes” or “octets”. The actual meaning of those bytes can happen in a lot of different ways, depending on the system where it is displayed or which language the text is intended for.
Since usually a “byte” is the smallest common unit for data on computers each “character” you see on a screen is represented by exactly one byte. Each byte can stand for a value from 0 to 255 and therefore you are able to display up to 256 different characters within one file.
Usually you have the “ascii” characters, e.g. a through z, A through Z, 0 through 9 and additional language dependent characters. For example, the German umlauts ä or ü or a lot of other special symbols from Russian, Greek, Hebrew or even Chinese. All this tots up to far more than 256 different symbols.
At this point it should be obvious that you have to take care to select the correct “charset”, which is needed on a lot of computer systems to display the bytes in the same way as they are intended.
A better approach is to combine two ore more bytes into a representation for a single character on the screen. This is for example what “Unicode” does. Unicode is a standard that currently uses a range from 0 to 65535 (and even more) to designate a given symbol. Almost each symbol of almost any language on earth (and even a lot more, e.g. well known icons or klingon) is assigned a unique and unabiguous number.
Unfortunately the handling of Unicode is a bit more complicated and does not work with most of the current tools. Texts in unicode might also be longer. A compromise is to use UTF-8 which uses 7 bits (8 bits form one byte) for the most common characters from the ascii set and switches to 2, 3 or even 4 or more bytes if needed.
Every vocabulary file for kvoctrain is basically such a simple text file using Unicode.
To support as many languages as possible kvoctrain version 0.7 offered the possibility to choose a special charset for each language. If you have saved your files in the former “8Bit-Mode” you might see the wrong characters when you load with version 0.8 and higher. Contact me in this case.
If you want to learn more about this issue you should visit the following links:
And how should I learn?
The usual way to learn with kvoctrain is to use one of its random query functions.
It keeps track of your knowledge of the expressions by assigning them one of seven grades ranging from “Level 1” to “Level 7”.
Several possibilities are implemented which can be configured in the dialog for the query options.
To keep the amount of expressions reasonable, restrict the query to a lesson and/or a word type. I personally prefer about 50 words per cycle and subdivide the lessons accordingly.
Furthermore, the range for the query can depend on the current grade, the number of queries and the last query date.
Learning is efficient, if you don't repeat the words for a certain length of time, dependig on the current grade.
There is a blocking and expiring mechanism for that case, so you are not obliged to modify the settings after each cycle. The known expression is blocked at least for the given time and will be shown after the expiration time.
The direction of the learning can be changed randomly to avoid one way learning.
For your personal taste or just for becoming acquainted with a new word, you can choose a query that shows the solution together with several other randomly chosen words (called multiple choice).
Special word types need special queries.
For this reason there are queries for the conjugation of verbs, comparision form of adjectives and the articles of nouns.
All these settings can be summarized into query groups and retained under an arbitrarily name.
When querying kvoctrain 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.
Remaining expressions of a currently running query are accordingly stored when you leave kvoctrain. After a later restart you can resume the query (currently this does not apply to special queries with verbs, articles and comparisons). Those expressions are marked with a green check mark in the main view.
The Menubar
- File->New
Creates a new document.
- File->Open... (Ctrl+O)
Opens an existing document.
- File->Open recent...
Opens one of the recently opened documents.
- File->Open example file...
Opens an example file shipped with kvoctrain
- File->Merge..
Merges another vocabulary to the current.
Only those parts of the second vocabulary are merged, that have the same international language code as your current one.
So always use the correct codes. This helps you share vocabularies with others. kvoctrain supports you in this and offers all codes in the according options page
- File->Save (Ctrl+S)
Saves the document.
- File->Save as
Saves the document under another name.
- File->Quit
Exits kvoctrain.
The Edit Menu
- Edit->Copy (Ctrl+C)
Copies the current row to the clipboard. The entries are separated by a special sequence of characters which can be chosen in the options dialog.
- Edit->Paste (Ctrl+V)
Pastes from clipboard. The entries are divided by the above mentioned separator character and inserted as a new row with one or more columns. You can also adjust the order in which the columns are concatenated bofore copying all to the clipboard.
Pasting multiple lines (e.g. from a CSV data base file) will append them all as new rows one after another.
- Edit->Select all (Ctrl+A)
Marks the whole vocabulary as ‘selected’ for further processing.
- Edit->Clear selection (Ctrl+Del)
Removes all multiple selection marks.
- Edit->Search from clipboard (Ctrl+F)
Pastes the clipboard content into the smart search entry field and searches this expression in all the entries in the current column.
- Edit->Append new entry (Ins)
Appends one or more new expressions. See Insert key section for more information.
- Edit->Edit selected area (Enter)
Edits current expression. See Enter key section for more information.
- Edit->Remove selected area (Del)
Removes selection. See Delete key for more information.
- Edit->Save selected area...
Saves the selection to a file.
The Vocabulary Menu
- Vocabulary->Show statistics
Invokes the statistics dialog to display the most important facts about your vocabulary.
- Vocabulary->Assign lessons
Searches the vocabulary for entries that are not yet assigned a lesson. They are randomly assigned new lessons.
- Vocabulary->Clean up
Searches for entries which are exactly the same (original and all translations) and removes all but one.
- Vocabulary->Append language
Appends a new column (a new language).
- Vocabulary->Set language
Sets the language code and name for a column.
- Vocabulary->Remove language
Removes one of the translations.
- Vocabulary->Document properties
Invokes the document properties dialog.
- Vocabulary->Language properties
Invokes the language properties dialog.
The Learn Menu
- Learn->Language Names
Provides a submenu for each language with all the query dialogs. Exactly the same as the menu appearing in a table header button.
- Learn->Resume random query
Resumes the previous random query if you terminated one before. Remaining entries appear with a green check mark.
- Learn->Resume multiple choice
Resumes the previous random query with multiple choice.
The Options Menu
- Options->Toolbar
Toggles the visibility of the toolbar buttons.
- Options->Statusbar
Toggles on or off the status line at the bottom.
- Options->Inline editing
Toggles on or off inline editing in the table cell.
- Options->General options
Invokes the general options dialog.
- Options->Query options
Invokes the query options dialog.
- Options->Save options
Saves the options. Only selectable if the options are not already saved automatically.
The Help menu
- Help->Contents... (F1)
Invokes the KDE Help system starting at the kvoctrain help pages. (this document).
- Help->What's This? (Shift+F1)
Changes the mouse cursor to a combination arrow and question mark. Clicking on items within kvoctrain will open a help window (if one exists for the particular item) explaining the item's function.
- Help->Report Bug...
Opens the Bug report dialog where you can report a bug or request a ‘wishlist’ feature.
- Help->About kvoctrain
This will display version and author information.
- Help->About KDE
This displays the KDE version and other basic information.
Table header menu
The following context menu will appear when you keep the third button (your original expressions) in the table header pressed for about a second.
- Create random query
Creates a random query on this column with all unknown expressions according to your threshholds.
- Create multiple choice
Creates a random multiple choice query on this column with all unknown expressions according to your threshholds.
- Query verbs
All of the verbs with its conjugations are queried.
- Query articles
Queries the articles if the gender of the nouns is defined.
- Query comparison
Queries comparison forms.
- Query synonyms
Queries the synonyms.
- Query antonyms
Queries the antonyms.
- Query the examples
Queries the examples.
- Query paraphrase
Queries the paraphrases.
- Sort
Sorts this row in ascending resp. descending order.
- Set language
Chooses a language for this column. If your desired language does not yet exists in this menu, you have to add it with the options dialog.
The following two topics only appear if you keep a header button pressed that belongs to a translation.
- Reset properties
Resets the properties of all the selected entries to their initial state as if you just had appended them.
If you have chosen a lesson in the appropriate box in the toolbar, then only those lesson members are reset. Otherwise all entries are affected.
- Remove language
Removes this column and all its entries.
Dialogs
This dialog also consists of several pages the determine properties that belong only to the current document. They are stored with the vocabulary.
- Title
Here you enter the title of the document which is displayed in the window's title bar.
- Authors
Usually you will enter your name in this field. If there are more than one author you might use a line for each person.
- License
If you want to restrict (or better allow) the use of you vocabulary you should enter the according permission or license here.
I recommend something like the Free Document License
- Remark
This field should contain things that do not fall in one of the other categories.
Here you add, modify or delete descriptions of your lessons.
The buttons should be pretty selfexplanatory except Clean up. This one will remove all lesson descriptions that are unused in the current document.
Similar to the previous section about lessons, you can edit your own expression types on this page.
Since the dialog page looks the same as the one before there is no picture.
The last page provides the possibilty to enter your own usage labels.
Important
If you think an important item is missing (from the above tense, type or usage label section) you should tell me, so I can include them in the application as standard item.
This way all the other users can benefit.
- allow sorting
If you have created your vocabulary with a certain order, you can use this checkbox to turn sorting off for this document. A click in the header button will then no longer sort the row.
Version 0.7 of kvoctrain additionally offered the choice to either use ‘8Bit’ or ‘Unicode’ to store the vocabulary files. This is no more supported. The files are always stored in Unicode to prevent wrong rendering of characters.
Unfortunately there is no backwards compatibility to versions below 0.6 any more but I think the benefit is worth it.
If you have important files that are rendered wrong in the new version you may contact me since it might be worth the effort to create some conversion tool.
Language properties dialog
The following pages of this dialog determine for each language of this dictionary several elements that are used in the according queries.
- Article
For every gender you enter here the definite and the indefinite article. If there is none for this language, you leave the field empty.
- Conjugation
In the similar manner you input the descriptor for the first, second and third person each in plural and singular.
Because many languages do not distinguish in the third person plural, there is a checkbox to determine this.
Leave the uneccessary fields empty.
Version 0.7 of kvoctrain also offered the choice for a special charset. In Qt™ version 3 there is no need for this any more.
If you have important files that are rendered wrong in the new version you may contact me since it might be worth the effort to create some conversion tool.
Options dialog
The settings of this dialog are global and affect all vocabularies equally.
- Automatic backup interval
kvoctrain will automatically save the document if it was modified after the period you enter here when the option is checked.
As a side effect it also does not ask for confirmation to save when quiting with modified data but saves the vocabulary without asking.
An interval of 0 also stops this behaviour.
- Smart appending
If this feature is activated, you will repeatedly be prompted with the entry dialog. After entering the first original you have to enter the corresponding translations. Afterwards you proceed with the next original and its translations until you stop by pressing the ESC key.
When you are in this mode and modify the lesson in the dialog it has the same meaning as selecting the lesson in the toolbar. This way it is preselected when the next entry dialag appears.
The required lessons will have to be created in advance in the document settings.
- Save options automatically
When checked, all options are save upon termination of kvoctrain. Otherwise you have to select the appropriate menu item.
- Column resizing
When you resize your main window it is convenient, if the columns resize automatically, too.
This is possible in two manners:
- Automatic
kvoctrain makes each columns the same width except the leftmost with the lesson names which has half the size of the others. The second column which contains the picture that describes the state of the row has a fixed width.
- Percent
The widths of the columns are altered with the same factor the main window grew or shrunk.
If the last button labeled “fixed” is set, no resizing of the columns is done.
- Language code
Each column can be assigned a language. This is internally done with the usual international language codes e.g. en, de, it. These codes are also stored with the document.
You should always use the correct codes to be able to share vocabularies with others. Merging vocabularies also relies on the correct language codes.
- Alternative code
Sometimes it may be useful to have a second language code because some languages have the usual short code and one or two longer codes. For German for example it is common to use de but either deu or ger is also possible according to ISO639-2.
- Language name
Here you can give the language code a descriptive name in your own language which is shown in the header buttons in the main view.
- Picture
Additionally you can add a nice icon to your language which is shown in the table header button.
KDE 2 stores those pixmaps under $KDEDIR/share/locale/l10n/language -code.
- Delete
Deletes the currently selected language code in the list.
- Add
After entering a new language code in the field to its left, you use this button to append it to your list. After that you need to fill in the fields for the long name and the picture for the header button.
- Add language from KDE database
Pressing this button opens a menu that contains all the countries that are known in your KDE installation. Ordered by country you can add your desired language properties to your personal list.
Maybe you want to change the language name or the according picture but I strongly recommend you keep at least the 2-byte language code and its 3-byte alternative if you don't have a special reason. This is to achieve compatible document files that can be shared among all users.
- Add language from ISO639-1
Pressing this button opens a menu that contains all the language codes that are covered by “ISO639-1”.
Basically the previous two button provide the same data. The former contains the language codes known in KDE sorted by country whereas the second contains all ‘ISO639-1’ codes sorted alphabetically.
![[view options dialog]](options3-dlg.png)
- Table Font
Lets you choose a font to display the vocabulary in the main view.
- IPA Font
Lets you choose a font to display the characters from the international phonetic alphabet. This is used to show the pronounciation of the expression on the bottom in the statusbar.
Probably you don't have an IPA enabled font since those characters are seldom used. You may download a free font from http://bibliofile.mc.duke.edu/gww/fonts/Unicode.html or http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/unicode/fonts.html . Install these fonts for example with kfontinst.
If you have StarOffice installed you probably have the font “Lucida Sans Unicode” which also contains most of the needed characters (but be sure to select the font which ends with “Unicode”).
I also found a Reference and Introduction to Phonetic Symbols that explains a bit about the background. There is also The International Phonetic Association where you can find even more information.
- Grade colors
Every grade can be assigned an individual color. For example I prefer green for best grade and red for worst.
If you don't want any colors but just black on white, uncheck the according check box.
- Separator
This is a sequence of one ore more characters which divide the parts of an expression when transfering data from or to an other application over the clipboard.
The most common item is TAB which uses the tabulator character. Another possibility is to use the semicolon, if you want to export data to a database file in CSV format.This character is also used to read such files correctly.
- Order
When pasting via the clipboard kvoctrain does not know which languages the different fields belong to and just would insert them from left to right.
To facilitate correct behaviour, if you arranged your vocabulary in an other way, you can determine your desired order with this area.
The buttons right to the list box move the current language up or down. Skip will insert a hole which means that the later calculated field from the clipboard is skipped.
- Use current document
When checked, the items in the clipboard are assumend to be in the same language order as the current document.
Query options dialog
Depending on the dictionary or the time you have to learn the vocabulary different settings may be optimal.
For that reason all the settings of the pages of this dialog can be summarized under an arbitrarily chosen name. You can store the settings and recall them whenever you want.
- Retain
Retains the settings of the other pages under the current name.
Saving to disk is done as with all the other settings using the according menu item of the options menu. Some properties are stored with the document. For example the lessons to include since this depends on the document in use.
- Recall
Recalls the settings from the group in the listbox.
- New
Creates a new group with the current settings.
- Delete
Removes the current group.
- Time per query
Here you can influence the behaviour of kvoctrain when you don't know the answer in time.
You may set a time limit kvoctrain grants you to remember the correct answer.
Additionally you can tell kvoctrain what to do when this limit is reached. Besides of waiting unlimited time you may select to be shown the solution or to continue immediately with the next question.
Furthermore you can activate a little progess bar to show the remaining time for the current answer.
If you exceed the time limit several times in series in continuous mode kvoctrain will assume that there is currently no person in front of the screen and stop the query.
- Swap direction randomly
Usually a query is only in one direction, depending on the column you used to start the query. With this checkbox you can determine, that the directions are altered randomly.
With this dialog you determine which entries are included in the next selection for random query.
Important
If you have activated the blocking mechanism on the next dialog page, the threshholds from Grade, Query count, Bad count and Last query are disabled and not taken into account.
- Lesson
Designate which lessons to include or leave out. An arbitrary number of lessons can be selected for the calculation.
For convenience there are two additional buttons to selected all entries or none.
Starting with version 0.7.0 this part is stored with the document instead of storing globally.
- Word type
Select the word type. kvoctrain does not pay any attention to subtypes.
- Grade
The same for the grade.
- Query count
Choose how often the selection must be queried.
- Bad count
The same for the amount of times the entry was not known.
- Last query
Include queries before or within the given time span.
Entries which have not been queried yet are always included if you choose before.
Entries are only included if all conditions are fulfilled. If you want a property to be ignored, choose Dont care for it.
On this page you select the time, an known entry is excluded from queries resp. when it must be queried at the latest.
There are two conditions which must be fullfilled, otherwise you will be shown an according warning:
The time must increase from level to level
The time for blocking must be less than for expiring in the same level.
If at least one of blocking or expiring is active, the threshholds from Grade, Query count, Bad count and Last query on the previous dialog page are not taken into account.
Entry dialog
Here you enter a new expression into a table cell or modify existing entries and their properties.
- Expression
Contains your words.
- Lesson
Selects the desired lesson.
The button on the right also invokes the document properties page where you can enter a new lesson.
- Pronunciation
In this field you can describe how the word is pronunciated.
This is possible either by using simple ascii charaters and maybe an fancy and very personal phonetic description or better by using the international phonetic alphabet. The button on the right invokes a dialog where you can select all the characters that belong to this alphabet.
- Type
Lets you choose one of the predefined types for your expression. If you change the type for an entry, all the other entries in that row will be assigned the new type.
See the table for all available types.
- Subtype
Some types also include subtypes. If there is no subtype available this field is disabled.
Every entry in a row can have a different subtype. This is useful for nouns as the gender of a noun may be different in different languages.
The button to the right of this field invokes the according page from the document properties dialog so you can enter a new type immediately.
- Usage label
One or more usage labels can be selected to describe the usual usage of the expression, e.g. medicine or chemistry.
The button on the right also invokes the according page from the document properties dialog to enter a new usage label.
If you have an IPA-enabled font installed your dialog should look like this:
If you don't have such a font you can find a link to a free one in the section about the view options.
Less important properties that did not find place on the previous page are located here.
For most of these fields there are special queries, too.
- Synonym
Here you may enter words that have the same meaning as the expression. There is also a query type for this expression.
- Antonym
This is for words that have the opposite meaning. This field can also be queried.
- Example
Additionally you may enter here an example sentence for the expression. There is a simple query type which prompts you with the content of this field but with dots instead of the word in question.
- Remark
This is an optional field to store additional information.
- Paraphrase
Here you may enter a description in different words. There is also a query type for this expression.
If you want to create an efficient multiple choice query it is good to offer expressions that are similar to the solution to make it more difficult. If you don't offer them, kvoctrain has only the possibility to create such queries with randomly chosen expresions which are rather easy to guess. You can enter up to five expressions for this purpose.
This page is only accessible when you selected verb as word type.
For every tense kvoctrain knows you can enter the conjugations of the verb for the different persons. The tense can be selected from the list. After doing this the entry fields are updated accordingly.
Because some languages don't distinguish in the 3rd person of the plural you may use the according checkbox.
Next searches for the next tense with already entered conjugations.
This page is only accessible when you selected adjective as word type.
Here you enter the the comparison forms of the adjective.
For some properties it is possible to set up values from the original or to the original. For example you can have a grade when querying the translation (=> from the original). The opposite is the grade when querying the original when one of the translations is given (=> to the original).
- Grade
Contains the current grade of this expression.
- False friend
Sometimes there is a word in a foreign language that looks like a word in your native language so you think it must have the same meaning. But in fact, it is not.
Enter such words in this field.
- Last query date
This is the date when this entry was last queried. If it was never queried yet you only see --.
For convinience reasons there are two buttons to set the current date or reset to “never queried”.
Due to internal reasons, it is not possible to store dates before August 12 1999 with every version of kvoctrain. Versions 0.8 and later are no more affected.
- altogether
Designates how often this entry was queried.
- wrong
Shows the amount of times you did not know the right answer.
If you have to enter or change a lot of words you may want to place the main window next to the entry dialog and occupy the whole screen. You may do this manually or use one of the two buttons in the bottom left corner. The left one resizes the windows to an optimal height and places them one upon the other. The second places them accordingly side by side.
After closing the entry dialog the main window returns to its previous position and size.
Query dialogs
After selecting Create random query the main window disappers.
Then all entries that match your current threshholds are put into a list and shown in random order with the following dialog box.
In the dialog area with the original expression there are some properties you can enable to give you some hints. You have to enter the solution in the according text field.
- Show all
Shows the complete solution in the Translation field.
- Show more
Each click on this button will show one more character of the solution to give you a little help.
- Verify
Compares your answer with the correct solution. Currently your solution must match exactly to be accepted. If the answer was correct the color of the translation changes to green, otherwise to red
- Don`t know
Tells kvoctrain that you did not know the answer and that the according grade must be lowered.
- Know it
Click this button to tell kvoctrain that you knew the answer correctly. This entry is then removed from the current“bad list”.
- Edit
If you find a mistake with a query you can invoke the edit dialog immediately and correct it.
- Stop query
Stop query mode and show vocabulary again.
In the right bottom corner you see two progressbars that indicate the remaining time and the amount of queries to come.
The query of the current lesson is repeated until all its expressions are known. The amount of retries of the current lesson is shown below the progress indicator. Once the current lesson is finished kvoctrain continues with the next (provided that you have set up the query options accordingly).
I regret to admit, but usually I don`t know the solution. For this reason the Return key has special behaviour, which I found convenient:
First pressing Return shows the complete solution (at the beginning the button Show more is the default button) and makes Don`t know the default button.
Pressing Return the second time will leave this dialog and tell kvoctrain that you did not know the answer.
At the moment you must decide for yourself, if you knew the answer or failed. Later versions may provide a more or less smart algorithm to make this decision from the answer you entered.
If you knew the corrent answer, the grade is increased by one step. If you did not know it, the grade is reset to level 1 which is worst.
This type of query works similar to the previous one. The solution is shown together with random other expressions and you have to choose one answer from the five provided.
This query works most efficiently if you provide similar solutions on the according entry dialog pages. Additionally a false friend is added if available.
This dialog appears after starting the query of the verbs.
All tenses are queried that have definitions for conjugations. Of course you must know all of them for a successful result.
In this dialog the article of the noun is queried.
It is important to having selected the correct subtype in the entry dialog.
All expressions that contain also comparison forms are shown. One word is chosen randomly and you must complete the remaining two.
The queries for the above mentioned additional properties of your expression look basically the same for all types.
You are prompted the expression and have to enter the according property. Querying by example is a bit different since kvoctrain takes the expression and replaces it by some dots so this is mainly useful when your expression is a single word.
Document statistics dialog
On this page you find the most important general information about your document:
The filename
The title
The name of the author
and the number of entries and lessons.
Depending on the amount of translations your document contains, you will have none, one or more additional pages. Each page contains two pictures for each lesson describing the amount of entries per grade in each lesson.
A click with the right mouse button on one of the pixmaps will popup a menu which shows the exact numbers.
Dictionaries
If you have created a dictionary, please send an email to <kvoctrain@ewald-arnold.de> and tell me about it. I plan to collect pointers to those files and include them in this handbook. If I find an electronic abode for kvoctrain with enough space, I might also store them there.
But please:
Don't send me any files before telling me. Maybe someone else has already started this type of dictionary.
The dictionaries should have a reasonable good quality as I don't want to do any revision.
If you modify existing vocabularies or create vocabularies based on copyrighted material you must ask the author for permission. Even taking literal examples from schoolbooks might be problematic!
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 kvoctrain 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 directory 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 directory with the same name and the extension kvtml.
Dictionaries in ascii-format are for example available at:
ftp.uni- ulm.de/pub/misc/dict/english_german.tar.gz (approx. 350 kB)
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 don't want to learn but just need quick translations of expressions in larger dictionaries you might be unhappy with kvoctrain 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).
qtrans (Qt™ 2.x).
Interesting links
You might also want to try one of the other vocabulary trainers I have found (sorted by the time when I found them):
QVocab (Qt™)
Vokabel-Trainer (Tcl/Tk)
Lingvisto (X)
KVoclearn (KDE)
SVT (console)
chflashcard (X11, for Chinese)
Vocabul ary Trainer (freeware, all flavours of Windows®)
The author of this application has also written a theoretical article about learning languages (German only).
wordtrain (console)
vocabbox (Python Qt™/KDE)
DokVok (KDE)
Wordlearn (Windows® 32/commercial)
GVoctra (DOS)
Vocitrainer (Mac/Win32, commercial)
Other interesting links
Maybe you are interrested in the one or the other links I found while working on kvoctrain.
Credits and License
kvoctrain is my first GUI application for KDE, so I had to borrow a lot of code from other applications. The biggest chunks are taken from
Klpq (table functionality in versions up to 0.7)
Kontour (XML reading/writing).
KHexEdit (“about” dialog in versions up to 0.7).
I'd like to thank the following people personally for their contribution to kvoctrain:
Andrea Marconi for localisation to Italian
Hans Kottman for localisation to French
Grzegorz Ilczuk for localisation to Polish
Eric Bischoff for converting the documentation to DocBook
I also want to thank all the other unamed persons, especially the whole KDE team, for their help, constructive criticisim, suggestions or bug-reports.
Copyright
kvoctrain Program copyright 1999-2001 Ewald Arnold <ewald@ewald-arnold.de>
Documentation copyright 1999-2000 Ewald Arnold <ewald@ewald-arnold.de>
This documentation is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
This program is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Installation
kvoctrain is part of the KDE project http://www.kde.org/.
kvoctrain can be found in the kdeedu package on ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/, the main FTP site of the KDE project.
Current snapshots and dictionary files can be found on the kvoctrain homepage.
Anonymous CVS download is also available.
Important
Don't use the CVS code from the Sourceforge server because ths branch is obsolete.
You can find precompiled binaries as rpm packages for the SuSE distribution (of almost all KDE apps): LinuKS: SuSE Linux KDE Service.
Another place for precompiled packages is Linuxberg.
Requirements
In order to successfully compile kvoctrain, you need the KDE libraries as well as the Qt™ C++ library. All required libraries can be found on ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/.
kvoctrain is tested with KDE 3.0 and Qt™ 3.0. It should also basically run under KDE 2.x and Qt™ 2.x if compiled accordingly but I can't promise.
Compilation and installation
In order to compile and install kvoctrain on your system, type the following in the base directory of the kvoctrain distribution:
% ./configure % make % make install
Since kvoctrain uses autoconf and automake you should have no trouble compiling it. Should you run into problems please report them to the KDE mailing lists.