Regarding our language tools

[Andreas Cord-Landwehr]

Hey, thanks for bringing this topic up! I think it is good to start thinking about the future of our language 
learning applications and discuss where we want to go. In the currently changing world with (in the near 
future) simple deployments of KDE apps into markets like tablets and cellphones, there weill be good 
opportunities for educational apps that we should use.

But as Inge said, there is work ahead ;) What I read in this thread were IMO three related but somewhat 
different topics:
 1. Who are our users and how do they interact with our software
 2. Data storage backends for language learning material
 3. Creation and distribution of language learning material

All of them are quite important, yet, I think for the start we should focus on the interaction design and only 
move on once we have a common opinion how this shall be done the future.

As I perceived Parley (and KWordQuiz) they are nice applications that build on the Leitner box principle, have 
an awesomely cool core infrastructure and great internal design, and are tailored for a users that create 
their vocabulary material by themselves and then train on that material. As a plus, they provide 
sharing/downloading options like get-how-new-stuff and different interfaces like for google apis and 
wikipedia. For this user group, they work fine (and I can say this also from my own learning experience.)
But this is different when looking at users that try to use these apps with other expectations, e.g., as an 
adult learner who does not follow a specific textbook with vocabulary lists.

To make discussions about the interaction design of software more effective, there exists a well known 
approach called "Personas". (In a nutshell: we create artificial persons that describe our user base and all 
further user interaction discussions/feature requirements solely focus on their interests)
During our last Edu sprint, we discussed a set of three language learning personas [1]. Yet as today, I think 
out of this set we especially have two primary personas, Gan and Camille, for which we should create 
software.

And that is what I would like to propose: Figure out for both, Gan and Camille, what they expect from 
Parley (or a possible future version). How would they interact with a vocabulary trainer, what are their ways 
of using it?

Having this data, we could effectively look at Parley and see where it is already great and where we have to 
change the way it interacts with the users. I am also sure that in this process we will understand how 
learning materials must be distributed to be of use for them.

If others are interested in this, I could create a wiki page where we could work on this together.

Greetings,
Andreas

[1] https://community.kde.org/KDEEdu/Artikulate/Personas

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