How to organize contents?
One of the first questions in this project would be, "how the contents should be organized?", considering the limited functions of Memrise, to maximize the learners' progress.
Memlingo would be the first thing that the learners may have in their hand for learning Esperanto. Without much of teaching assistance from other human teacher or other books, the learners should be able to grasp the language just using only Memlingo alone. How can we make the learners comfortable in that situation?
The points to reflex in the contents.
(1) Memrise is basically a 'memorization tool', which means, it's not very good to teach 'structural rule' or grammar.
How to organize contents, in 'some memorizing way', for the learners to absorb naturally the structural knowledge?
(2) Memrise provides some kind of 'spaced repetition', but it's not quite perfect.
How to minimize the 'boring repetition', and keep learners to continue?
(3) Memrise is just a strictly-ordered set of expressions.
How to give right priority to maximize the learning effectiveness?
(4) Memrise asks typing letter by letter, for expressions less than 3 words. That's somewhat tedious.
How to remove the boring/troublesome typing exercises.
(5) It's not easy to attach explanations to Memrise.
How to let the learners absorb the subtle differences, nuances of the language?
Possible solutions to these issues.
One of the key solution is to remove words and expressions less than 3, making them longer than 3 or 4 words.
Even to teach a single word, attach more words around it and expose them to the learner as a whole .
Ekz: amiko => estas mia amiko
This simple strategy (at least 3 words) seems very powerful, because it naturally introduces some kind of grammars and rules for the learners.
If we have two or more 'extra words', then we can utilize them as a tool for teaching the grammar rules, by giving lots of different variations.
Ekz. amiko => estas mia amiko
Ekz. vidi => vidis mian amikon
Ekz. pri => vidos pri la amiko
The learners may naturally get exposed to the different combination of suffixes and word-order and learns the grammar rules of the language without much of explanation. (which is exactly how babies learn.)
Example List
Left lists are two different sets of the 'first lessons' of the course.
First list introduces individual words one after another and then shows the combinations. It would take longer to learn even for beginning learners, because it causes tedious repetitions.
Second introduces new words in context, all the time, without much of explanation. Human learners can learn linguistic rules out of these contextualized examples.
Owing to the way that Memrise is exposing the lessons to the users, the second list would be suitable more than the first one.
Question for content creators would be: Is it suitable for the complete beginners to be exposed to those combined expressions, right from the beginning without much of explanation?
This course aimed to be the first/sole course for many newcomers, without much of material that explains the grammar things. Wouldn't it cause any troubles for those complete newcomers?
(This needs to be experimented, tested and then needs to be adjusted.)