I have Chess DB and it does not allow conversion to English descriptive notation (e.g. 1 P-K4 P-K4). I learned chess using English descriptive and am much more comfortable with it than algebraic. I am interested in an inexpensive/free database that shows the moves in English descriptive and can print out a game transcript in English descriptive. Does CB Light or CA Light have English descriptive capability?
I know that CB 10 does but the price tag is well beyond what I am willing to pay.
Chessbase Light does have the ability to show notation in descriptive style.
You can download CB Light for free and try it with some limitations.
The biggest limitation is you can only have a single database open at one time with a limit of the first 30,000 entries being shown. If all your database files are under 30,000 games, your good to go.
There are some other minor limitations, but for the most part you can at least open up and play around with small databases.
It might be well worth your time to get used to AN. A letter to the editor of Chess Life in 1968 suggested a few aids to learn the files: King = Emperor, Queen = Dame, associate the Bishop with Cardinals and Friars, and any Knight should be Bold and Gallant.
This is the letter that started it. It is linked to from here.
Or you could learn Smythescript notation. Here are the first few moves of a sample game (a variation of the Gruenfeld):
Bill Smythe
Another descriptive notation devotee here. I learned the game on DN and will continue to use it until the day I die!
Thanks for the suggestion. I looked at CB Light on the CB website. Apparently I can’t edit games or add new games without upgrading to CB Light Premium. I will download CB Light soon and import some PGN files generated by Chess DB and see how I like it.
As to the debate descriptive vs algebraic I don’t really care. I am very comfortable with descriptive so I will stick with it. I have a large chess library that is entirely written in descriptive and I should be so lucky as to live long enough to exhaust and assimilate the resources of these books. 
One could edit games in the earlier version of ChessBase Lite. (I think it was 4.0.)
Does anyone know where I can get a copy of the older version?
You can edit games in the free version of Chessbase Lite 2007. I decided to check it out and I can do it. You just can’t save them. And it still has the ability to use various notation schemes, including what you are looking for - English Descriptive Notation.
It did look kinda funny to me after all this time using SAN in my databases to see EDN instead. 
I use Chess Assistant and I couldn’t find anywhere in it that I can use EDN. (Doesn’t mean it isn’t there; I just didn’t look terribly hard.)
Now if you want this EDN:
The white king commands his owne knight into the third house before his owne bishop.
Scroo it … 
… you are on your own!
There are drawbacks that I noticed with the freeby version of Lite.
I have slightly more than 3,200,000 games in my database in Chess Assistant.
I dug around and all the other free chess databases that I could find or have used in the past are based on PGN. Which is nothing more than SAN with a special header.
*PGN - portable game notation
Other than searching FTP sites, I couldn’t find Lite 4 anywhere. The amount of time it would take for me to get set up to work FTP sites like I did nearly 20 years ago and start searching, I would just as soon buy the premium program. Although I feel pretty sure that somewhere in ftp land you will find all the old versions of Lite, I leave that up to you.
*FTP - file transfer protocol
Good luck!
Since this post is about descriptive vs algebric, does anybody know how to read german or russian notation, I run some chess tournaments and from time to time I get a game in german or russian notation and it takes me a while to figure it out, so if someone could post what they mean I could have a reference for future use. Thank you.
In German K=K, Q=D, B=L, N=S, R=T, and P=B. All I can remember from Russian is knight=K and king=Kp. It should be easy to figure out from the scoresheet of a good player who plays book openings as squares such as f3, c3, c4, b5, g7 and c2 for example can be reached by only one piece by good players early in the game.
Russian for…
King (“korol”) is Kp as previously stated.
Queen (“ferz”) looks like the Greek letter phi (“o” with a capital “I” through it)
Rook (“lad’ja”) looks like the Greek letter pi, but the left leg is curled to the left.
Knight (“kon”) is K as previously stated.
Bishop (“slon”) looks like an English capital C.
Pawn (“peska”) has no symbol based on my limited Russian library, and is designated by the algebraic square.
Do the Russians use first eight letters of the Roman alphabet, and not their native Cyrillic alphabet, for the algebraic file names?
Yes
Years ago I saw a tournament game where one player was using algebraic, except he used the letters S-Z rather than A-H. He also put the rank number before the file letter instead of after. Castling was ! and ? (short and long).
When I saw this, I decided that if you wanted to get silly, you should go all the way. That’s when I invented Smythescript notation.
Bill Smythe
Please tell us more.
I recently found that you can actually google “Smythescript”. Put quotes around it to avoid some bogus matches. None of that stuff was put there directly by me, by the way.
Bill Smythe
In the last tournament I played in, one of my opponents (a child) almost had a cow when he saw that my board did not have letters and numbers running along the sides. During the game, he asked how to write down his move.
It would be a great help if chess teachers or parents made sure their charges knew how to use SOME form of chess notation. I read books in both algebraic and descriptive, as well as in Russian and German. It’s really not that big a deal.
What is heaps of fun is studying from older books in Spanish! The descriptive notation of course then uses different letters.
P, P, P, P, P, P, P, P
T, C, A, D, R, A, C, T
I haven’t tried any French books yet.
Chessbase (regular not light) does allow Descriptive Notation. Go under Tools/Options/Notation and you will see some boxes on the top whichallow you to choose how you want to see the moves. The third onefrom the left say 1. P-Q4
Andy