All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $220, our price is $19.95!

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

Learn Saudi Arabic 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 Saudi Arabic Hijazi Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $220 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 Saudi Arabic Hijazi 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 less than 10% 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 Saudi Arabic Hijazi Basic Course

FSI Saudi Arabic Hijazi Basic Course contains over 10 hours of audio, and one textbook in PDF file format with 304 pages.

Of the three major dialects in Saudi Arabic - Hijazi, Najidi, and Shargi - Hijazi is used throughout the country for the government and commercial purposes, and has become the most widely understood dialect in the Arabian peninsula. Even so, there is no 'standard' Hijazi dialect, but the basis for the Saudi Arabic Basic Course is 'urban' Hijazi, to distinguish it from the bedouin dialects also native to the region. The aim of the course is 'working' proficiency in the language. The course enables you to speak and understand Saudi Arabic speech at a normal rate in a variety of social and business contexts.

There are three major groups of dialects in Saudi Arabia--Hijazi, spoken on the western coast, in Jidda, Taif, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; Najdi, spoken in and around Riyadh, in the north central part of the country; and Shargi, spoken in the oil-rich eastern region. While the Najdi dialect enjoys prestige by virtue of its conservatism and relative closeness to Classical Arabic and the fact that it is the dialect of the royal family, the Hijazi dialect is used throughout the country for government and commercial purposes, and has become the most widely-understood dialect in the Arabian Peninsula. The Hijazi dialect is not "pure" Saudi Arabic, and reflects recent borrowings from other dialects, especially Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian; for this reason, sometimes one word or expression was selected from several which may be heard, and sometimes alternative expressions are introduced, since two or even three forms may be in frequent use.

Since there is no "standard" Hijazi dialect, this book reflects the dialect as spoken in Jidda. Whenever forced to choose between language usage in the other Hijazi cities and that of Jidda, the Jidda usage was given preference. A few of the most common words from Najdi and from other cities are introduced for recognition and identified as such. There has also been a preference for "modern" words and structures, despite the fact that this sometimes means rejecting an older, more "Saudi" usage. This dialect has been designated "urban" Hijazi to distinguish it from Bedouin dialects also native to the Hijaz region.

The pronunciation of some sounds in Arabic Hijazi is variable. There are three interdental consonants (variations of 'th') which may be pronounced as they are in Classical Arabic and in Najdi, as for example in /thalaatha/, or as they are in Egyptian and Palestinian, which would be /talaata/.Since the latter type of pronunciation is more common in Jidda, it will be presented. This is discussed further in the Pronunciation section.

The book is divided into 50 lessons. Each lesson (beginning with Lesson 4) has the following parts:

The dialogues have been kept short and were designed to be practical and worth memorizing. Each dialogue should be· memorized for recitation and practice among the students.

Structure Sentences. In each lesson, certain words and grammatical structures are presented. Structures which did not appear in the dialogue will be illustrated in these sentences. Structure sentences serve the purpose of linking the dialogue sentence&, which are necessarily limited in type, with the grammatical explanations coming up in the Grammatical Notes. They contain examples of new structures used in a sentence context.

Arabic Grammatical Notes. New structures are presented and explained, with examples.

Situations. These are typical situations, with the sentences given in English, which the student should be able to say in Arabic after he has mastered the lesson. This section may be used as a self-test at the end of every lesson.

Cultural Notes. Where appropriate, comments on speech attitudes, situational behavior, or social etiquette are presented.

Every tenth lesson is a review lesson.

In addition to the 50 lessons, the book contains a series of appendices dealing with specialized vocabulary, social expressions, gestures, and Saudi names. There is also a glossary and an index of grammatical structures.

Learn Arabic 1 - Hello, how are you, greetings

Learn Arabic 2 - Good Morning

Learn Arabic 3 - Visiting a home

Learn Arabic 4 - You speak arabic well, where did you study?

Learn Arabic 5 - Do you speak English?

Learn Arabic 6 - Welcome, what is your name?

Learn Arabic 7 - How's the family

Learn Arabic 8 - May I ask a question

Learn Arabic 9 - Hello, I missed you, how is your health?

Learn Arabic 10 - Can you tell me when you arrived

Learn Arabic 11 - In the office

Learn Arabic 12 - Telling time

Learn Arabic 13 - When did you come to the Kingdom

Learn Arabic 14 - When will he come?

Learn Arabic 15 - Going to the post office

Learn Arabic 16 - How much does this cost

Learn Arabic 17 - I like this, how much?

Learn Arabic 18 - How old are you? Your birtday is..?

Learn Arabic 19 - Family, brothers, and sisters

Learn Arabic 20 - I want to buy those..

Learn Arabic 21 - In a taxi

Learn Arabic 22 - How long have you been waiting

Learn Arabic 23 - Where are you going

Learn Arabic 24 - In a front office

Learn Arabic 25 - On the telephone

Learn Arabic 26 - Dialog in an office

Learn Arabic 27 - Do you speak Arabic?

Learn Arabic 28 - Are you a professor

Learn Arabic 29 - I'd like to introduce you..

Learn Arabic 30 - I don't know what he bought

Learn Arabic 31 - Ticket and passport please

Learn Arabic 32 - At the gas station

Learn Arabic 33 - Going to the Bazaar market

Learn Arabic 34 - The weather is hot!

Learn Arabic 35 - Is there rain in Jidda?

Learn Arabic 36 - At the tailor

Learn Arabic 37 - An invitation dinner

Learn Arabic 38 - In a restaurant

Learn Arabic 39 - At the fruit stand

Learn Arabic 40 - I want to go to the desert

Learn Arabic 41 - Renting an apartment

Learn Arabic 42 - Arranging furniture

Learn Arabic 43 - At the post office

Learn Arabic 44 - Can you do me a favor?

Learn Arabic 45 - Vacation and Muslim holidays

Learn Arabic 46 - Government

Learn Arabic 47 - Tomorrow Ramadan begins

Learn Arabic 48 - The Economy is oil

Learn Arabic 49 - Current events in the news

Learn Arabic 50 - Review Dialogues