xpost: FREE foreign language courses from Foreign Service Institute

[Sara R]

http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/

 

These courses were developed by the government in the 40s and 50s for military personnel. They are now in the public domain. They contain book and audio!

 

I haven't used them (yet), but I watched a

. According to the reviewer, they contain lots and lots of grammar and drill, which is important for mastering a language. You have to know the structures automatically so the right words come out when you speak in a real setting. The drill is in a parts-to-whole format. Each little piece of the language is drilled separately, and then put together. The downsides, according to the reviewer, is that it is very dry. He also said that he had heard that the accent on the Korean program was not good. I just listened to a little of the German, and that accent sounded fine to me.

 

Even if this is dry on its own, I think it would be a great supplement to courses like Rosetta Stone, which are very weak on grammar and drill.

 

The reviewer, who has taught himself several languages, has reviews of other programs at this link. He also has tips on what he thinks makes a good language program. He divides up the programs into three different types, that work best for different types of language learners. He says the best courses were usually created in the 50s and 60s. Since then most courses have been dumbed down quite a lot. One simple way to judge a program is by looking at the glossary in the back. How many words are you expected to know at the conclusion of the program? You need roughly 3000 words to be functional in a language.

 

Edited to add:

 

These are also cool because of how many different languages are offered. Many of these I have never heard of:

 

Amharic, Arabic, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Cantonese, Chinese, Chinyanja, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hausa, Hindi, Hebrew, Hungarian, Igbo, Italian, Kituba, Korean, Lao, Luganda, Moré, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Sinhala, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Twi, Vietnamese, Yoruba

Edited March 10, 2009 by Sara R
added hyperlinks

[Angel]

Thanks for the link. Dear friends of ours are now serving in Kenya as missionaries. Sometimes dd's friend includes Swahili words in her emails. Dd might now be able to figure them out :)

[In The Great White North]

The downsides, according to the reviewer, is that it is very dry.

 

This is the understatement of the year. It makes Henle look like the Electric Company!

[katilac]

This is the understatement of the year. It makes Henle look like the Electric Company!

 

:lol:

[LadyAberlin]

My adopted sisters are from Ethiopia and they speak Amharic.

[Dee in MI]

BTW, this is the same audio used by Barron's Mastering Spanish and by the web site studyspanish.com

[Sebastian (a lady)]

One comment on these. Being older and intended for a government/military student, they may tend toward more formal usage and they might have some out of date terms.

 

Just as a for example, Fraulein isn't much used in German anymore, even though it probably appears in this program (and was in my German texts through the 1980s). Now even a young unmarried woman would tend to use Frau.

 

Not trying to convince anyone not to use this. Just a reminder that you might end up sounding a little dated. But that's nothing that a few months in Germany won't get out of your system.

 

[before anyone corrects me, I know that Fraulein should have an umlaut. Anyone able to teach me how to add them here? Fraeulein just looks awful.]

[Sara R]

[before anyone corrects me, I know that Fraulein should have an umlaut. Anyone able to teach me how to add them here? Fraeulein just looks awful.]

 

I just figured this out, thanks to an old post from Dee in MI. Follow the instructions at this link:

http://www.studyspanish.com/accents/typing.htm

 

The reviewer I mentioned above, a "polyglot" professor who has taught himself many languages, also has videos that describe how to go about teaching yourself a language. He also has reviews of many of the common teach-yourself-language products that are out there. (He doesn't like Rosetta Stone, based on his experiences with students who have come through it and not known much.) Anyway, he points out that you need to use multiple materials if you want to teach yourself a language. One source isn't enough.

 

Another way you could get a sense of current usage is by reading a magazine or newspaper, or listening to podcasts. Reading and translating magazines is the method recommended by Barry Farber in How to Teach Yourself Any Language, which is an inspirational book that is applicable to homeschoolers in ways that I think are still untapped.

Edited March 11, 2009 by Sara R

[In The Great White North]

To get umlauts, one must insert them from special characters. The only (and truly onerous) way to get them here that I have found is to create a word doc with the word, enter the special character, and copy and paste the word here.

 

Fräulein

Needless to say, I don't bother very often.

[Alessandra]

That (FSI) is a really neat link. I can't think my children would like it, bit I do -- I learned German that way - painful, but effective. BTW, I thought that the French accent was just fine.

 

And the reviewer is very thorough -- I'll look forward to watching more of his video reviews.

 

Thanks!!!