All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $930 for Volumes I, II, III, and IV, and that they no longer have available the textbook for Volume I and II. We sell all Volumes with their respective textbooks for $19.95!

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

Learn French 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 French Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $930 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, and they no longer have the textbook for Volume I, which is Units 1 - 12. We purchased the material from NTIS, as evidenced by the screenshot provided of the original French Basic Course Audio Cassettes, and did the remastering work, which was 101 cassettes. We had the textbooks professionally digitized into a PDF files. And then we spent countless hours remastering the cassettes to a digital form, now we are providing this course to you for just 2% 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 French Basic Course

Planned in two volumes, the French Basic Course has been designed to help students reach a level of proficiency which will enable them to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations.

For beginning students, the twenty-four units are designed for a six-month intensive training program. Each unit presents a situational topic introduced in a dialogue, and usually five grammar points. Each grammar point is preceded by grammar notes which generally are expressed in non-technical terms.

Other units include materials of the following kinds.

A dialogue to provide a body of natural French conversation as a source for subsequent drills and exercises.

Useful words to supplement the vocabulary with a limited number of additional words, usually related to the topic of the dialogue.

Vocabulary awareness to enable the student to better identify the elements of the utterances he learned as a whole and to regroup and review vocabulary.

Drills of six different kinds, each type designed for a specific purpose.

• Lexical drills to manipulate already acquired vocabulary and improve fluency.
• Learning drills to introduce new grammar points (with reference to the corresponding grammar notes).
• Practice drills to give the student an opportunity to illustrate in sentences the grammar points just covered.
• Questions
• Answer
• Review Drills

Situations to improve comprehension and serve as a basis for questions and elementary conversation.

Narrations to provide reading material and introduce a very limited number of vocabulary items.

Written exercises to offer to the student opportunity to relate the spoken language to the writing system.

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.

About the French Language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language by most people from France, French speaking Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, and the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, as well as minorities elsewhere. Second language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts of the world, the largest numbers of which reside in Francophone Africa, and the highest proportions being situated in Gabon (80%), Mauritius (72.7%), and Côte d'Ivoire (70%).French is estimated as having 110 million native speakers and 190 million second language speakers. Additionally, French is the second-most studied foreign language in the world, after English.

French is a descendant of the spoken Latin language of the Roman Empire, as are languages such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Sardinian and Catalan. Its closest relatives however are the other langues d'oïl and French-based creole languages. Its development was also influenced by the native Celtic languages of Roman Gaul and by the (Germanic) Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders.

It is an official language in 30 countries, most of which form what is called, in French, La Francophonie, the community of French-speaking countries. It is an official language of all United Nations agencies and a large number of international organizations. According to the European Union, 129 million, in 27 member states speak French, of whom 65 million are native speakers and 69 million claim to be able to speak French either as a second language or as a foreign language, making it the third language in the European Union that people say they are able to speak, after English and German. Twenty-percent of non-Francophone Europeans know how to speak French, totaling roughly 145.6 million people in Europe alone.

From the 17th century to the mid-20th century, French served as the pre-eminent international language of diplomacy and international affairs, as well as a lingua franca among the educated classes of Europe. The dominant position of the French language has only recently been overshadowed by English. As a result of extensive colonial ambitions of France and Belgium at that time governed by a French speaking elite class, between the 17th and 20th centuries, French was introduced to the Americas, Africa, Polynesia, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean.