I decided to take up learning a little German, and yes, primarily for the fun of it. I got one of those CD-based audio courses, which is pretty helpful. Still, sometimes you just need a simple way to practice your vocabulary to augment the audio course. Introducing KVocTrain, the KDE vocabulary trainer, which is useful for more than just learning another language.

I was born in Weisbaden, Germany to American parents serving in the mission field. According to my parents, I hardly knew any English when they brought me home; now I hardly know any German. Life is funny, as we all know, and I have found myself using Xing, a German-based networking system, similar to LinkedIn. Additionally, I have encountered quite a few German speaking people in the SUSE Linux community, at my former post at LXer, and even Charlotte (named for the German Qeen of the same name) has a growing German community. So it just might pay to learn a little German.

I bought audio lessons, and converted those to Ogg-Vorbis, so I can listen while driving in the car on my iAudio U3. I also downloaded the German Bible translations for BibleTime. That's all well and good, but I really haven't built up much of a vocabulary yet. So having a little vocabulary-building tool will come in handy.

To help me out, KDE's educational tools include a nifty little vocabulary-building program called KVocTrain (0.8.3 on Debian Etch and gNewSense-KDE 1.1). It is essentially a Flashcard type program that can be configured to suit your particular needs. In the grand scheme of things, assuming you have the program installed, you will then need to import the appropriate vocabularies for the language(s) you want to learn. You can modify lessons, configure them and even set profiles for different learning levels and styles.

Let's go ahead and download a vocabulary. Click File --> Get New Vocabularies (or [Ctrl]+G). You may be asked which server to connect to. If so, choose the default server (or add one, if you know of another). You should see a dialog with three tabs for Highest Rated, Most Downloads, and Latest. Scroll down until you see Basic Vocabulary German-English. Now click Install. The first time, you may need to select a folder in which to save vocabularies; after that, KVocTrain will automatically save them here. You will not get the opportunity to cancel a download unless you already have the vocabulary installed. Then KVocTrain asks if you want to cancel or overwrite the current file.

Note: KVocTrain vocabularies cover more than just languages. You will find vocabularies for SAT and other exams, music, medical terms and so on.

KVocTrain opens the most recently installed vocabulary as soon as it installs it. You can choose to open another from the file menu or toobar, if you want to change vocabularies. Initially, you will see a vocabulary listing, spreadsheet style, showing the learning level, the status of each term or phrase, the original language, and then each translation respectively. So, you may have a column for English, and a translation column each for German and Spanish. Frankly, trying to learn one language is hard enough.

In the toolbar, you should see a drop-down list containing the lessons included with that vocabulary. Simply choose one. Next, on the Learning menu, choose your primary language ("en" in my case). Then select a query to run. The Random query throws words at you, which you must guess the translation. The Multiple Choice query lets you choose from among a pre-defined set of possible words.

The verb trainer asks you to conjugate the verbs correctly, using the standard 1st, 2nd, & 3rd Person forms, both singular and plural. The Comparison Expressions trainer let's you focus on things like big, bigger, and biggest. It gives you one of the three comparison levels, and asks you to fill in the other two levels. So, too, with the antonyms and synonyms.

One cool feature that KVocTrain offers is example sentences. So you can choose the Example query, and see a sentence that uses period marks to designate the vocabulary word you need to know. Unfortunately, in using the English-Deutsch basic vocabulary, I discovered that this only seems to work for English, but not for German. Not to fear, though. You can actually edit the vocabulary.

To edit the vocabulary, simply click a word, and then use [Ctrl]+[Enter] or Edit --> Selected Area to bring up the dialogue. You can then add more information pertaining to the word. Under the Additional tab, you can enter the synonyms, antonyms, examples, and so on, as you see fit. Be sure to apply the changes when you are ready to close the dialog. Then save the file via the usual toolbar icon, or [Ctrl]+s.

Another cool feature is that you can use the settings to have KVocTrain randomly swap direction. This way, you get a mixture of original and foreign words, and have to translate both ways. This helps reduce the chance you will get into the habit of translating only one way, and sharpens your mind.

Well, that's about as far as I can go today. I need to stop writing about learning German, and actually learn a few new words today! But you should have a general idea about how to use KVocTrain for learning. I hope you will check out the handbook - it's fairly detailed and can help you explore further. KVocTrain is part of the KDE Education Project, and you can subscribe to the kde-edu mailinglist to get help.