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The ladybird browser project has an interesting methodology they say they are using to keep motivation up: instead of building every api from the bottom up, they are working in slices. Something like "make youtube work", from the low level features to the high level features needed for that. The idea is that it's more fun and fulfilling because you end up with an actual factual real modern website that works at the end of it, rather than implementing something like a camera api which isn't necessary. And lots of other sites will benefit from the support across the stack that youtube needed, so just focussing on that one site means a lot of other sites work better too.
I wonder how applicable the same idea is to language learning. In particular, i think that slices could successfully replace topic oriented vocabulary lists, which i find quite confusing. I find that most topics cause some confusion with their similar words or similar meanings, depending on the topic and language.
So instead of learning all the colours, or a bunch of animals in one go, perhaps it would be better to have a series of stories, little vignettes, each of which uses a collection of words frequently. An adjective, a few nouns and verbs, that sort of thing. Knowing this sort of combination is a lot more immediately productive than a list of rooms in the house or soft drinks, so dialogues can more immediately be explored. Then over time with more slices, the domain gets bigger and bigger.
In chinese i am mostly past this concept as described here, but i am still making use of it. Focussing on a book and the vocabulary inside rather than some abstract frequency list which is so boring to study. The point is to bring the productive feeling earlier so that people don't get simply fed up with the process too early.