All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $170, our price is $19.95!

 

 

 

Here is a picture of our Shona Basic Course Cassettes that we mastered using the Tascam Pro Audio equipment below. Double click the images to see a detailed image.

 

Learn Shona Language

Language Experts agree, our courses are the most complete and thorough self-instructional language course available. Repetition, vocabulary, sentence structure are the building blocks our course utilizes to teach a language. Lots of repetition drills. Dialog drills. Pronunciation drills. Vocabulary. The audio material is from native speakers and the corresponding textbook is your guide. Our Methodology, Guided Imitation, sets the student on a path to a certified level of fluency. We no longer sell our courses in Volume I and Volume II, so there's no up sell for the next level. You will receive the entire course material, on DVD, for the lowest price we can afford to produce, $19.95. Our shipping cost is $5.45 for domestic shipping and $16.45 for international shipping, which is the exact price we pay the U.S. Postal Service to ship priority mail. We do not make money off of shipping, and ship priority mail because it is the fastest and least expensive way to ship. The DVD will play in both a PC or MAC, and the audio can easily be saved to an IPOD or other MP3 device. You will need Adobe Reader to access the PDF textbook.

Our Value Proposition

The Shona Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $170 from NTIS, the United States printing service for audio/visual materials; however, they only sell it on audio cassette as you can see from our screen capture of their shopping cart. We purchased the material from NTIS, as evidenced by the screenshot provided of the original Shona Basic Course Audio Cassettes, and did the remastering work. We had the textbook professionally digitized into a PDF file. And then we spent countless hours remastering the cassette to a digital form, now we are providing this course to you for roughly 12% of the cost of original material. Only $19.95!

Our Quality Proposition: It's all about the Remastering!

We used Tascam Pro Audio equipment to do the initial digital remastering from cassette to compact disc. Once completed, we converted the compact discs into an uncompressed WAV file. We copied what would have been on Side B of the Cassettes, to the end of Side A, creating one continous file, saving again as a WAV file. We used audio software, like Nero and Audacity, to clean up the audio even more. This multi step process includes converting the mono file to stereo, normalizing the volume across the entire WAV file, removing "clicks and pops", doing a low frequency filter, then a high frequency filter, truncating silences to 3 seconds to ensure the audio is quick to begin and end without dead space, normalized the volume again, and outputting the file as another WAV file. We used an MP3 encoder to convert the WAV file to an MP3 file, and we tagged all files with Subject, Title, Copyright, Volume I, Volume II data.

What does all this mean?

The remastering process and filter work means that silence sounds like silence. And in this case, silence truly is golden. Our product is of unparalleled quality, and we can honestly make the claim that no one has spent more time making these courses sound as good as our courses sound. We have provided significant improvements to the sound quality versus the original masters, and even the material we were selling just a year ago, thanks to current technology. All you have to do is open our files in a sound editor and see that silence is a straight line, not wavy, and this means clarity.

About the Shona Basic Course

The Shona Basic Course course covers the essential grammar of the spoken language of Zimbabwe. The course is intended as an introduction to Shona by providing students with information on situations in which they are likely to use the language. It also provides systematic practice on all major points of grammar. Shona basic is divided into 49 units plus a glossary. Most of the units include dialogues, notes, oral reading practice, practice conversations, supplementary vocabulary, and free conversation.

Drills are recorded first for listening, then for familiarization through repetition, and finally for participation. During the participation step, when the student performs the required manipulation, his utterances are confirmed on the audio immediately following the space provided for his participation.

Drills are generally in two groups in any unit: a) variation drills on pattern sentences, which provide opportunities for the student to develop flexibility in the use of patterns already memorized, and b) grammar drills, which are intended to provide practice for the student in the operation of the patterns explained in the immediately preceding grammar notes.

This volume is intended to give the learner a start in Shona, providing him or her with dialogs that relate to some of the situations in which he or she is likely to use the language, as well as with systematic practice on all major points of grammar. Emphasis is placed on leading the learner to assume increasing amounts of responsibility and initiative as he or she progresses through the book.

Learn Shona 1 - A married couple exchange greetings in the morning.

Learn Shona 2 - A non married couple exhcange greetings in the morning (more formal)

Learn Shona 3 - How have you spent the day

Learn Shona 4 - Talking to children

Learn Shona 5 - Meeting: Greeting from one traveller to another.

Learn Shona 6 - When did you come here? teacher, pastor, missionary

Learn Shona 7 - Their family is large. How many children do they have?

Learn Shona 8 - Going shopping at the store

Learn Shona 9 - Buying some fruit.

Learn Shona 10 - to look for, seek. Who are you looking for?

Learn Shona 11 - Where does the path go? It goes into the village.

Learn Shona 12 - You speak Shona very well. Where do you study our language?

Learn Shona 13 - These students come from America. I want to learn to speak Shona.

Learn Shona 14 - I am selling vegetables.

About the Shona Language

Shona is one of the two principal languages of Zimbabwe, and extends also into adjacent areas of Mozambique. It consists of a number of dialects, but a standaraized form of the language, based on the Zezuru, Manyika, and Korekore dialects, is generally used in printed materials. These dialects differ from one another in pronunciation (including tones) and in vocabulary, but they are in general agreement with respect to the underlying grammatical system. One feature of this book is the attempt to represent simultaneously in the transcription several different pronunciations, in tone as well as in vowels and consonants.