Dictionary files for Parley

[Gunter Ohrner]

Hello everyone!

Today I started playing with Parley, but I'm having a hard time getting it to 
work.

I'm using version 2.1.0 with KDE Frameworks 5.28.0 and Qt 5.7.0 from KDE Neon, 
so it should be a quite recent version.

Yet I was not able to find dictionaries to start with.

If I use "File -> Download New Dictionaries" I only get an empty "Parley Add-
On Installer" dialog which shows a "Network error. (6)" - whatever that means 
and whatever I'm supposed to do about that. My internet connection works fine 
while this happens...

Then I Googled quite a bit but I'm only stumbling across dead links. It's 
quite frustrating, to be honest.


"KDE parley dictionary" leads to

* https://www.kde.org/applications/education/parley/

which suggests to use

* http://kde-files.org/index.php?xcontentmode=687

This link only leads to a HTTP login dialog without any information about what 
credentials I should enter or how or where to obtain them...


Googling for "KDE kvtml download dictionary" leads to

* https://edu.kde.org/contrib/kvtml.php

which in turn also references to kde-files.org with now explanation of where 
to obtain the required account / login credentials.

This page also directly links to some dictionaries, but most links are dead. 
I'm specifically looking for a German / French dictionary, which was not 
offered there, so I tried to get an English / French one.

However

* http://files.kde.org/edu/eng-fra_irregular_verbs.kvtml

as well as

* http://files.kde.org/edu/eng-fra_daily_words.kvtml

return "file not found", and most other links seem to do the same.

Manually browsing the file structure at http://files.kde.org/edu/ leads to at 
least some of the files, but you manually need to get the idea to tweak the 
download URLs - nothing for the casual pure computer user who just wants to 
learn a language.


Even with the provided dictionaries, Parley asks a lot of stuff about each 
word which I simply cannot answer - the same as when I try to add new words. I 
need to choose the type of each word - verb, adjective or noun, and if I 
clicked the wrong button I do not seem to be able to revert my mistake...

For nouns I need to choose the gender and also do not seem to be able to 
revert a wrong selection.

If I chose correctly I can enter a myriad of information of each word I do not 
know a fraction of... That's not Parley's fault, of course, but I had hoped to 
get around this by using predefined dictionary files. Apparently, that hope 
was in vain.


I then tried to create my own set of training cards and I made the mistake to 
press the "Download Grammar" button in "Edit->Languages". This duplicated or 
quadrupled the different time forms in the time forms list.

When I tried to delete the duplicate entries - which can only be done one at a 
time, you cannot delete all eg. 22 duplicates (French language) en bloc - each 
click on delete seemed to remove random entries from the list - sometimes 
several, sometimes none, and in any case not directly related to what I 
selected... (At least, I could not find any direct relationship between the 
entry selected and the entries deleted...)


As I can't believe it's that difficult to actually use Parley, I'm thinking 
that I'm doing something massively wrong - but I'm not sure what my mistakes 
are...


Do you have any suggestions how to get started?

Meanwhile I somehow managed to get my "time forms" lists clean again and will 
now just try to enter basic word lists and see if I can somehow use that for 
training until I have any better alternative. :)


Regards,

  Gunter