3. Working with kvoctrain

3.1 Overview

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. The leftmost column contains the name of the lesson this entry belongs to. The second is always the original word and the others to the right of it represent the respective translations.

In the picture above, you can also see that several properties of the vocabulary have a visual representation:

• colors show the grade (Level 1 to 7) of your knowledge
• bold face lines are currently selected for a query
• 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 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 properties of the current expression if available:

• T: the type of this word
• P: how to pronunce this expression
• 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.

3.2 Using the keyboard

I tried to optimize the work flow for the use with the keyboard. So all of the 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 additionally keep SHIFT pressed while entering the next letter of your word (or press Return for the next match) only entries that match from the beginning of the expressions are recognized.

Pressing SHIFT-tab will move back to the vocabulary.

SPACE

There are two possibilities:

• SPACE for its own selects or de-selects the current row. This means this line is included in (or excluded from) the next query. When selected, the row appears in a bold face font.
• If you press a shift key (one of shift, control or alt) together with the SPACE key, the current entry is assigned the lesson which is shown in the lessons listbox in the toolbar. If the entry was already assigned a lesson, it will belong to no lesson afterwards.

Cursor LEFT

The cursor in the vocabulary is moved one column to the left. If it has reached the leftmost column, nothing happens.

Cursor RIGHT

The cursor in the vocabulary is moved one column to the right. If it has reached the rightmost column, nothing happens.

Cursor UP

The cursor in the vocabulary is moved one row upwards. If it has reached the topmost row, nothing happens.

Cursor DOWN

The cursor in the vocabulary is moved one row downwards. If it has reached the bottommost row, nothing happens.

Cursor 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.

Cursor 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.

+ -

Pressing the control key and one of the two number pad keys, + or -, you can choose the previous or next item in the combo box determinig the current lesson. If you don't have a number pad ypu may also use the normal + or - keys.

Some of the menus also have accelerator keys. They are shown on the according entry on the right side.

The buttons on top of the rows are acessible by the keyboard. To avoid clashes with the shortcuts for the main menu you have to press SHIFT + ALT and the key of underlined letter in the button text. Then the corresponding header menu will pop up.

3.3 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.
• Keeping pressed the left mouse button for about 1 second in on of the table header buttons will pop up its header menu.

3.4 Working on multiple selections

It is possible to mark arbitrary ranges. You can then modify one or more properties for the selection or save them as a new file.

• If you keep the control key pressed while clicking on an entry, the whole row is marked for further processing. A click on a marked entry will remove this type of selection.
• When you additionally press a shift key when clicking on an entry, the selection will be extended (or shrunk if you additionally press the control key) from the current entry to the point where the cursor was previously.

The selection will disappear after a simple mouse click in a table cell without a key pressed.

It is also possible to create multiple selections with the cursor keys. The shift and control keys have the same function here. If you want to move the cursor to an other area you have to keep the alt key depressed to prevent the selection from disappearing. If you want to select several areas you will have to press a lot of keys, but it works.

If you invoke the edit dialog to modify a selection 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 it's field and only those properties are altered in your selection.

3.5 Available file formats

kvoctrain can read and write the following file formats:

• It's 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 M$ Windoze. It uses the file extension "lex". Link seems to be dead. See the section about available dictionaries to download these files.

• Simple text files with special delimiters between the entries which are also used by simpled database programs. The extension is "csv" in this case. 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.

3.6 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 definite article indefinite article		a, an the
Conjunction	serves to bind words or sentences	and, but
Name	name of a person, a creature, sometimes a thing	Big Ben, Tom
Noun male female natural	naming of things, feelings	table, coffee (english does not distinguish here)
Numeral ordinal cardinal	counting or numbering of things	first, second one, two
Phrase	special combination of words	to kill two birds with one stone
Preposition	tells you about the relationship or location	behind, between
Pronoun Possessive pronoun Personal pronoun	tells about the ownership of something stands as a replacement for a noun	my, your you, she
Interrogatory	introduces questions	who, what
Verb regular verb irregular verb	who is doing something or what is happening	to cook, cooked, cooked to go, went, gone

3.7 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 therefor you are able to display up to 256 different characters within one file.

Usually you have the "ascii" characters, e.g. a..Z, A..Z, 0..9 and additional language dependent characters. E.g. 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 fare more than 256 different symbols.

At this point it should be obvoius that you have to take care to select the correct "charset", which is needed 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 to designate a given symbol. Almost each symbol of almost each language on earth (and even a lot more, e.g. well known icons) 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.

To support as many languages as possible kvoctrain offers the possibility to choose a special charset for a 8 or 16 bit based representation as well as the storage of the files and in the computers memory in UTF-8.

Unicode is only supported on QT2 based systems since this only works well if the underlying system works with uncode.

If you want to learn more about this issue you should visit the following links:

• http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/chars.html
• http://linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Unicode-HOWTO.html
• http://czyborra.com/charsets/codepages.html

3.8 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 does not apply to special queries with verbs, articles and comparisons).