Getting started
Parseh is a toolbox for learning a language the way Ilya Frank’s reading editions teach one: the text cut into small chunks, each chunk glossed, and the narration playing in step, so that you read, hear and understand at once. It runs on your own computer as one small web server, and you use it in a browser — on that computer, or on a phone or a laptop that can reach it.
It teaches eleven languages — Persian, Arabic, Italian, Japanese, French, German, Turkish, English, Hindi, Spanish and Chinese — right to left for Persian and Arabic, and set vertically for Japanese and Chinese when you want them so.
1. What is behind the doors#
The first page Parseh opens on is the hub, and everything is behind one of its doors:
| Door | What is behind it |
|---|---|
| Books | reading editions: a book in small chunks, each with its gloss, the audiobook playing in step |
| Videos | a YouTube video, or a film of your own, with its whole transcript underneath and every phrase glossed |
| Studio | notes on the language in a small Markdown dialect, read on screen or built into a PDF |
| Exercises | decks of the studio’s exercises, studied like Anki cards: each comes back when it is due |
| ⚑ Review later | the chunks you flagged while reading or watching, to go back to, test yourself on, or turn into cards |
| ⇆ Anki | the card store the books and the videos write cards into, and the way to and from Anki |
| ✂ The clip tray | the recordings and pictures cut for cards, waiting to go onto one |
| 🔍 Reading what nobody has glossed | dictionaries, and the rest of what reading an unglossed text takes |
What you read through them is yours: Parseh comes with the doors and nothing of anybody’s, so its shelves are empty until you fill them.
2. The short version#
- Get it, and install it, once. Download the newest release’s zip,
parseh-<version>.zip, from the releases page and unpack it where Parseh will live. Then, on Linux, run./install.shin that folder; on a Mac, double-click Parseh.command; on Windows, double-click install.bat. Installing Parseh says what that does and what it needs. - Start it. On Linux,
./serve.sh; on a Mac, Parseh.command again; on Windows, serve.bat — whose first run is a setup wizard. See Starting and stopping. - Open it at
https://localhost:7654/. Your browser warns you once about the certificate, which Parseh made for itself: accept it, and it never asks again. From a phone, use one of the other addresses Parseh prints — From a phone or another computer. - Pick a door on the hub.
- Update it from ⚙ Settings → Updating Parseh, when a new version comes out: your books, decks, dictionaries and settings stay as they are. Updating Parseh says how.
When you are done, the ⏻ stop button at the top of the hub stops the server; while it is still working on something — a build, an upload — it tells you first.
3. Where to go from here#
The other sections of the guide take each door in turn: the books, the videos, the studio, its Markdown and the exercises written in it, the exercise decks, cards and Anki, looking words up, and the languages, and the reference, where the commands are and what a message means.
The pages of this section, below, go through the first steps one at a time: installing and starting, the hub, the two interfaces, the ⚙ settings of a page, the Working… indicator, where everything lives on the disk, the backups, and this guide itself.