"part of the quest is figuring out what the quest actually says"
I'm getting flashbacks to learning Latin from "Lingua Latina - Familia Romana". Here's a book in Latin with a couple pictures. A pity you can't read Latin, not yet. There's a couple footnotes in English. Also there's enough Latin borrowed into English that you can figure some of it out. If you can puzzle out what the heck is going on, you'll learn Latin. Or you'll get very frustrated. Likely both.
Every couple years I put in an effort until I get annoyed and quit.
All I really remember is the first chapter was a discourse on the geography of the classical era Mediterranean world, so if you know anything about history and/or geography it was pretty easy to puzzle out, and the second (or so) chapter introduced you to your large host family. Later chapters discussed the concepts of time and money, if I recall correctly.
It doesn't really ebook well because of a lot of annotation to "help".
A modern analogy completely in the English language would be the "Diary of a wimpy kid" series. My son read those, and I occasionally wondered if the author of those books knew about or was inspired by "Familia Romana". I'm not implying Familia Romana was a comedy, the funniest part was probably some sibling rivalry in the host family. But it was a mix of pictures and words I haven't seen in a book since early grade school.
I think a videogame has several advantages over the book format as you can offer different contexts to learn the same thing in a rote way, and let the user ask questions.
Also, Latin just has too many weird tenses and stuff to pick up that way, I would imagine. At least English to French or Spanish, there's shared grammar.
I'm getting flashbacks to learning Latin from "Lingua Latina - Familia Romana". Here's a book in Latin with a couple pictures. A pity you can't read Latin, not yet. There's a couple footnotes in English. Also there's enough Latin borrowed into English that you can figure some of it out. If you can puzzle out what the heck is going on, you'll learn Latin. Or you'll get very frustrated. Likely both.
Every couple years I put in an effort until I get annoyed and quit.
All I really remember is the first chapter was a discourse on the geography of the classical era Mediterranean world, so if you know anything about history and/or geography it was pretty easy to puzzle out, and the second (or so) chapter introduced you to your large host family. Later chapters discussed the concepts of time and money, if I recall correctly.
It doesn't really ebook well because of a lot of annotation to "help".
A modern analogy completely in the English language would be the "Diary of a wimpy kid" series. My son read those, and I occasionally wondered if the author of those books knew about or was inspired by "Familia Romana". I'm not implying Familia Romana was a comedy, the funniest part was probably some sibling rivalry in the host family. But it was a mix of pictures and words I haven't seen in a book since early grade school.