Dictionary files for Parley

[Andreas Cord-Landwehr]

Hello Gunter,

thanks for your feedback, just had a look at your problem. Actually, "Network 
error" is kind-of OK, since there is really a connection problem to the Get-
Hot-New-Stuff server.
Actually, there are two problems you discovered:

- the GHNS server settings broke during the recent change to the new KDE 
store, I just filled an upstream issue at the store and will take care that 
this will work again
- in the meantime, in the download dialog you can simply select the category 
and change it, which will show you all other downloads that are provided by 
different servers (yes, here is another bug that prevents the UI from updating 
when an error occurs; will look into that, should be easy to fix)

However, for the future it would be great if you can report bugs via 
bugs.kde.org. This helps to keep them better organized than via mailing list.

Cheers,
Andreas

On Sunday, October 16, 2016 3:19:53 PM CEST Gunter Ohrner wrote:
> 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