All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $380 for Volume I and II, our price is $19.95!

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

Learn Chinese Cantonese 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 Chinese Cantonese Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $380 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 Chinese Cantonese 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 5% 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 Chinese Cantonese Basic Course

FSI Chinese Cantonese Basic Course contains 25 hours of audio, and two textbooks in PDF file format with 821 pages.

This Chinese Cantonese Basic Course is a course in spoken Cantonese. It uses all the basic grammatical structures of the language and a vocabulary of approximately 950 words. The subject matter of the course deals with daily life in Hong Kong. There are 30 lessons in the course. Each lesson contains five sections: I) a Basic Conversation to be memorized, II) Notes, III) Pattern Drills, structural drills, IV) Conversations for Listening, a listening comprehension section, and V) Say it in Cantonese, English to Cantonese practice, much of it in conversational question-answer form, in which students activate what they have learned in the lesson. The early lessons in addition contain explanation and practice drills on pronunciation points, and some classroom phrases for the students to learn to respond.

Objectives of the Chinese Cantonese course

The objectives of the course are to teach students to speak Standard Cantonese in the locales where Cantonese is spoken, to speak it fluently and grammatically, with acceptable pronunciation, within the scope of topics of daily life. The course was not designed to lay the groundwork for learning the written language. At the end of the course students will be able to buy things; talk on the telephone; ask and give directions; handle money; discuss events past, present, and future; make comparisons; talk about themselves and their families; tell time; order simple meals; talk with the landlord, doctor, servant, bellboy, cabdriTer, waiter, sales-clerk; discuss what, when, where, why, who, how, how much.

All the conversations and drills in this book were written by native Cantonese speakers working under the direction of an American linguist who specified which grammatical points to cover and what situations were required. The design of the text--what to cover, what sequence to use in introducing new material, what limits to set on vocabulary--, the write-ups of structure notes, types and layouts of pattern drills, and the contents of the English-to-Chinese translation sections, were done by the American linguist.

Chinese Cantonese Pronunciation Practice

In general, the Chinese Cantonese Pronunciation Practices concentrate on giving limited explanation and fuller practice drills on new sounds encountered in a lesson, plus comparison drills with sounds previously learned and sometimes coaparisons with American close counterparts. Instead of giving many examples, using items unknown to the students the pronunciation drills stick to examples from material they have met in the Basic Conversation or Pattern Drills. The exception to this is Lesson One, which presents aa overview of all the tones, consonant initials, and vocalic finals of the language, in addition to giving an introduction to intonation and stress. Students who absorb pronunciation best thouugh mimicking the model and who find the linguistic description of sounds confusing or boring or both, should concentrate on mimicking the model and skimp or skip the explanations.

Learn Chinese Cantonese Conversation

Learn Chinese Cantonese 1 - At the beginning of class in the morning, classroom phrases

Learn Chinese Cantonese 2 - What is your name?

Learn Chinese Cantonese 3 - What language are you speaking?

Learn Chinese Cantonese 4 - What time is it?

Learn Chinese Cantonese 5 - Stopping in to see a friend

Learn Chinese Cantonese 6 - Customer and clerk in a department store

Learn Chinese Cantonese 7 - Customer and clerk in a grocery store

Learn Chinese Cantonese 8 - Buying socks at a department store

Learn Chinese Cantonese 9 - Ordering on the phone

Learn Chinese Cantonese 10 - Directions to the Mandarin hotel

Learn Chinese Cantonese 11 - Brother and sister sharing a taxi to work

Learn Chinese Cantonese 12 - Two friends meet at a bus stop

Learn Chinese Cantonese 13 - Directions to the taxi driver

Learn Chinese Cantonese 14 - Having lunch in a Chinese restaurant

Learn Chinese Cantonese 15 - Getting directions on the street

Learn Chinese Cantonese 16 - Discussing what you did the previous day

Learn Chinese Cantonese 17 - Talking at a party

Learn Chinese Cantonese 18 - University student talks to elder sister

Learn Chinese Cantonese 19 - Walking to the bus stop, meets a new friend

Learn Chinese Cantonese 20 - Ask about the family

Learn Chinese Cantonese 21 - Talking about the weather in Taiwan

Learn Chinese Cantonese 22 - Talking with a friend

Learn Chinese Cantonese 23 - Asking for the roomboy in a hotel

Learn Chinese Cantonese 24 - At home, realizing she is thirsty

Learn Chinese Cantonese 25 - Reading late, her son comes home

Learn Chinese Cantonese 26 - Daughter answers the door

Learn Chinese Cantonese 27 - At the American Consulate

Learn Chinese Cantonese 28 - The postman is at the door

Learn Chinese Cantonese 29 - Arriving for an appointment

Learn Chinese Cantonese 30 - Discussing an approaching typhoon