All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $168 our price is $19.95!

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

Learn Chinyanja Language Course TOC

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 Chinyanja Language 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 Chinyanja Language 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 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 FSI Chinyanja Language Course

FSI Chinyanja Language Course contains 9 hours of audio, and one textbook in PDF file format with 374 pages.

Chinyanja 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.

Chinyanja 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.

Chinyanja, the principal language of Malawi, is spoken not only in that country but by large numbers of Malawians in neighboring countries. This course is intended to give the student a start in the Chinyanja language, both by providing them with materials for study, and by guiding them in taking over more and more of the responsibilities connected with language learning. The goal is the ability to speak a little Chinyanja well, and ability to learn much more of it as is needed for individual work situations in Malawi.

Speakers of English who are studying Chinyanja find the pronunciation less difficult than it is confusing. Chinyanja has no "clicks", no ''whistling z's" and no "coarticulated stops", yet published descriptions of the consonant sounds of the language leave the would-be learner in doubt at some crucial points.

An example from English may help to make the problem clearer. Suppose that a speaker of some other language has learned to pronounce English top in two ways: in both pronunciations he closes his lips in order to form the 'p'. In one, he allows his lips to open immediately thereafter, and a small puff of air escapes: in the other he keeps his lips closed indefinitely. Each pronunciation is quite common in normal spoken English. His question is, 'how important is this physical difference? Are there some words in which only one of these is correct, and other words in which the other is required? Or may I just forget about the difference and use these two sounds intercnangeably?" The answer, of course, is that the two are interchangeable. For that reason, we need not and do not represent the difference when we write. But the same student of English may find the physical difference between tie and die just as subtle as the difference between the two pronunciations of top. Yet native speakers of English do not interchange the sounds that begin these two words. The foreign learner of English must keep them apart from one another: and the difference is reflected in our spelling by the fact that we have the two separate letters t and d.

Returning now to Chinyanja, the student will hear sounds that resemble the dz in adze, and others that are similar to the z sound in as. He has no serious difficulty in making either one of them, but he still needs to know what status this physical difference has within Nyanja. Are there some words where he must use dz and not z, and others where z is right and dz wrong? Or may he forget about the physical difference and use the two sounds interchangeably? And what about a p-like sound with no aspiration (puff of air) after it, and a p-like sound that is followed by strong aspiration? How much attention should he pay to this difference?

Learning Chinyanja Language Course TOC

Learn Chinyanja 1 - What is your name?

Learn Chinyanja 2 - Where are you from?

Learn Chinyanja 3 - Where is your present home?

Learn Chinyanja 4 - When did you arrive

Learn Chinyanja 5 - When did you arrive

Learn Chinyanja 6 - When di you arrive

Learn Chinyanja 7 - By what mode of transportation did you arrive

Learn Chinyanja 8 - How old are you?

Learn Chinyanja 9 - When were you born?

Learn Chinyanja 10 - Where were you born?

Learn Chinyanja 11 - Where do your parents live

Learn Chinyanja 12 - Do you have any brothers and sisters

Learn Chinyanja 13 - Are you married?

Learn Chinyanja 14 - Do you have any children

Learn Chinyanja 15 - What kind of work do you plan to do?

Learn Chinyanja 16 - Do you like it here?

Learn Chinyanja 17 - How long are you going to stay here?

Learn Chinyanja 18 - Where are you living at present?

Learn Chinyanja 19 - Is this yours?

Learn Chinyanja 20 - Good morning, where are you going?

Learn Chinyanja 21 - Are you going to the market

Learn Chinyanja 22 - Do you have a wife

Learn Chinyanja 23 - Where do you live, Mwanza.

Learn Chinyanja 24 - Where do you live, Mwanza.

Learn Chinyanja 25 - A younger friend comes to visit an old man

Learn Chinyanja 26 - Are you going to Limbe today?

Learn Chinyanja 27 - I'm glad to see her

Learn Chinyanja 28 - Peter has just arrived at the home of a friend

Learn Chinyanja 29 - Hello, did you have trouble getting here?

Learn Chinyanja 30 - Being introduced to people

Learn Chinyanja 31 - Are you married

Learn Chinyanja 32 - I've come to see you

Learn Chinyanja 33 - Do you speak Nyanja?

Learn Chinyanja 34 - There are some young men teaching Nyanja

Learn Chinyanja 35 - I speak a little, no this is not my language

Learn Chinyanja 36 - A European asks about local languages in the vicinity of Malawi

Learn Chinyanja 37 - Where do you live, I live three villages from here

Learn Chinyanja 38 - I live in Mwanza

Learn Chinyanja 39 - Useful questions and answers

Learn Chinyanja 40 - Useful questions and answers

Learn Chinyanja 41 - A Peace corp volunteer is asked about his work

Learn Chinyanja 42 - A Peace corp asks an aquaintance about his work

Learn Chinyanja 43 - Two fellow workers look forward to quitting time

Learn Chinyanja 44 - Just arrived into town and looking for work

Learn Chinyanja 45 - Still looking for work

Learn Chinyanja 46 - How's the work going

Learn Chinyanja 47 - A conversation on the way home from work

Learn Chinyanja 48 - Prospect of a business trip out of town

Learn Chinyanja 49 - Plans for the evening

Learn Chinyanja 50 - Street and road directions

Learn Chinyanja 51 - Road directions

Learn Chinyanja 52 - Directions to a rural school

Learn Chinyanja 53 - Directions within a town

Learn Chinyanja 54 - An unsuccessful attempt to get directions

Learn Chinyanja 55 - October weather in Malawi

Learn Chinyanja 56 - December weather in Malawi

Learn Chinyanja 57 - Febuary weather in Malawi

Learn Chinyanja 58 - April weather in Malawi

Learn Chinyanja 59 - June weather in Malawi

Learn Chinyanja 60 - August weather in Malawi

Learn Chinyanja 61 - Buying maize

Learn Chinyanja 62 - Buying peas

Learn Chinyanja 63 - Buying tomatoes