Creating language learning lessons
Greetings to my fellow conlangers. I've been working on a conlang I call Cerstan. Lately I haven't gotten to do a lot with it because I've been holding on any vocabulary creation or modification until the entire dictionary was transferred from a Microsoft Word doc to a Lexique Pro database. The move took awhile, and having a memory issue/crash halfway through that wiped out the entire database (and requiring restarting) didn't help matters. But that's all done with.
Now I'm ready to go on building vocabulary (I've been translating the first chapter of John from the New Testament, as well as various other poems, chants, etc., whatever captures my fancy). I'm also ready to work on a set of lessons to learn it. You see, I have a cousin about 11 or 12 who is actually interested in it. He loves his big cousin, and thinks languages are cool. And as long as he's into all that, I'd be delighted to share a bit with him for as long as the interest lasts.
But a sure way to kill that interest is to have really boring lessons with no variety and all that. So I'm looking to put together a packet of materials, everything from lessons to read and answer questions to quizzes to run through certain programs to crossword puzzles to print out and do, to even interactive games if there are any I can make work for me. (And of course, I'll be chatting with him online when possible, and sending e-mails back and forth with bits of the language in them for practice.)
My first question to this community is, what suggestions do you have for creating this? Is there a sense of a format I should start with (greetings, etc.), any lists of vocabulary/phrases to introduce in certain orders? Obviously, some of this will depend heavily on my language's characteristics (it has a large set of cases and aspects, tending to be on the synthetic side of things), but some universals must exist.
The second question I have is, what materials do you suggest I use along with a basic set of lessons? Any freeware/free open source programs you highly recommend? Keep in mind that my cousin uses Ubuntu, so anything I recommend should be simple and basic enough that it'll work through Wine (something like a Windows emulator, but not exactly). In other words, no 3D graphics or anything too flashy. But anything web-based will work great, and I do have a site I can host some miniature games and such things at, so he can go there to play them. I have a good crossword creation program, and I can render those sorts of activities as pdf files, which don't depend on a specific OS.
One note: Although I do have a special script (and a font for it), there is a Latin transcription which I use most of the time, and would use in any lessons to start with. It uses accented characters, such as á, é, ô, and ñ, among others (all are found in either French or Spanish, to the best of my knowledge). I have no issue typing these, and he probably won't either (there are ways to set it up to be easy), but if the program or game won't handle anything but the basic 26-letter alphabet, it won't work.
I welcome any and all suggestions. Currently, the one program I know that I can make work is called MultipleChoice, a tiny (and by that I mean only 144 kb!) program that lets one create quizzes and then take them, with three or four options to choose from. I'm sure that won't pose an issue to Wine, and it isn't bothered by accents. Beyond that, I haven't figured out anything else yet.
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