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The language learning app [Duolingo](https://www.duolingo.com/) has tried very hard to make its example sentences entertaining. Perhaps I'm juvenile, but what works on me are:

* Ridiculous situations, such as "The duck is eating three elephants." They are also more memorable than pedestrian ones, and ensure that the student understands the individual words rather than guessing the meaning from context.
* Amusingly rude sentences, such as "I hate everyone and especially you."
* Pop culture references, such as "On Wednesdays, we wear pink."
* Innuendo. If you teach "There is a banana in my pocket.", the student will immediately be motivated to learn "Are you happy to see me?". Innuendo is most amusing when it is never openly acknowledged and the face meaning of the sentence is completely innocent.

As Scott Aaronson puts it: "I all too often ignore my own advice and lapse into boringness.  But at least I notice I’m doing it, get annoyed at myself, and resolve to be crasser, less mature, and less professional the next time around."

You do need some inherently boring exercises, such as selecting the correct inflection of a word, but at least the surrounding sentence can be funny or otherwise interesting.

Note that the *content* should be entertaining, not the window dressing: funny illustrations distract me from the exercise on the next page.

Avoid long drills (rosa, rosa, rosam…). It's probably more effective and certainly more entertaining to encounter the same word or grammatical feature throughout the book than in one tedious chunk.

For advanced students, excerpts from published stories in the target language are usually far more interesting than stories composed specifically to teach. As a child I went through my English textbook every year reading all the example texts.