[kde-edu]: kvoctrain: fundamental change in concept of vocabulary structure

[Peter Hedlund]

Marc Heyvaert wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Kvoctrain has one 'original' language and one or more
> tranlated languages. I wonder if it would be possible
> to get rid of this restriction, so that the original
> language could be 'set' at will.

Yes, I'm aware of this "problem". It's one of the things I want to try 
to change in KVocTrain. We'll see if it's possible.

> I know that in principle the following does not hold
> between languages : A translates into B, A translates
> into C so B translates into C. This is not generally
> true, but it is in a lot of particular cases. There
> are a lot of specialized vocabularies that could be
> build in such a way the the file containes the
> lexicology in 3,4, 5, even more languages and if we
> only can learn from the original language into one of
> the others this would mean that we have to duplicate
> the files...
> 
> Another example is the relationship between an
> original language, say English and Chinese. Chinese
> can be written in simplified characters, traditional
> characters, pinyin, wade-giles, etc. One should be
> able to learn from any 'language' into any other. How
> can we do this with kvoctrain today except by
> splitting the file?
> 
> Incidentally this example shows another flaw. As far
> as I can see we can only define 'real' languages,
> based either on KDE or iso. I thought of giving
> 'esperanto' here as an example of a language that was
> unavailable, but it is :) But one could imagine
> dialects and other specialized languages that are not
> defined, and I can't see (yet?) what a possible
> workaround would be. 

I agree with you here also. I want to look into it, time permitting.

> If we want to make 'setting' the original language
> optional (this could be saved at file level), there
> will be an impact on the 'levels' because the number
> of levels per language will grow exponentially with
> each language that is added. But perhaps we can
> discuss a restriction in the number of languages, or
> test to see at what level the combo of number of
> entries/lessons and number of languages becomes
> unmanageable.
> 

If possible, try to create one or two wishlist items out of this because 
I think the ideas are relevant.

Thanks,
Peter