Curso, kurso

This is a little bit brilliant:

http://www.interlingua.com/an/curso (Curso de interlingua pro comenciantes/Course in Interlingua for beginners)

The genius behind this course decided to make each lesson fit on a single A4 sheet of paper.  Most of the time it's even just one side of the page.  This makes it perfect for breakfast reading, or for those moments where you want to do something kind of intelligent, but not very taxing.

It's text-heavy in a good way, too.  Each page has a few paragraphs and a bit of vocabulary, so that you spend most of your ten minutes reading the language.  Then there are a couple of grammar points to note, and a handful of exercises to do.  The design is simple, but enjoyably so.

I have a few suggestions for improvement, though.  The vocabulary should be compiled at the end in summary - like the grammar points are.  The current vocabulary sheet just tells you which lesson glosses the word in question, when it would be so much nicer if it would lay out the word and some variations (like conjugating the verbs).  It would also be nice if the vocabulary in each lesson was listed either alphabetically or in order of appearance.  At the moment, it's neither.

If I could, I'd change the lessons' vocabulary to "proper" order of appearance (it's mostly order of appearance, but not exactly) and then have the whole list assembled in alphabetical order at the end.

It would also be nice if you could download the whole thing at once, instead of having each page as a separate file - that way you could have the thing as a "proper" eBook (and shorten the time spent downloading the course considerably).

I'd love to have something similar in Esperanto to accompany Kurso de Esperanto - just like I'd love to have something like Kurso to accompany Curso de Interlingua.  Somewhere between the two of them is a very comfortable way to ease yourself into the first steps of learning a language.

I still haven't found any introduction to a language that's quite as good as the Easy German/French/Spanish books published by Usborne (although I still liked their earlier incarnation as Learn German/French/Spanish).  Nicole Irvine's basic concept was quite fantastic.  I just wish someone made a DVD of the thing - that would be awesome.  Also, a version for Estonian.

There are dozens of great little courses and programmes out there where the creators/designers are getting little things so very right.  It's a shame we can't suck them all into lovely multi-format introductions to every language.