All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $180, our price is $19.95!

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

Learn Finnish 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 FSI Conversational Finnish Course, as you can see, sells for $180 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 FSI Conversational Finnish 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 Conversational Finnish Language Course

FSI Finnish Language Course contains 10 hours of audio, and one textbook in PDF file format with 709 pages.

As you move through the FSI Conversational Finnish language course, you will find it is built around principles which emphasize the development of basic communicative skills. The speech samples in this course reflect the Finnish language as it is spoken in practical, everyday social situations. The objective of each sections is to introduce and to expand your ability to use the principal features of the Finnish language to satisfy your social and professional needs in the host country. The structure is introduced in large chunks for overview, and smaller pieces are practiced cyclically to give you flexible control of the structure with review and reinforcement built in.

The aim and purpose of your textbook, FSI Conversational Finnish, is to serve as a basic course. With this course you are expected to develop the skills needed for fluent workable proficiency in Finnish.

Finnish 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.

Finnish 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.

FSI Conversational Finnish is organized into 14 topical units with structural notes in the end of each unit. The first four units should be studied in sequence as a block but after Unit V they can be studied individually in any sequence.

Learn Finnish 1 - Getting to know you

Learn Finnish 2 - Getting to know the place

Learn Finnish 3 - What would you like?

Learn Finnish 4 - Hearing it

Learn Finnish 5 - Entering the country, at the hotel, making a phone call, at a restaurant

Learn Finnish 6 - A beauty salon or barbershop, getting a taxi, at the department store

Learn Finnish 7 - In the bus, at the market, gas station, post office

Learn Finnish 8 - At the bank, sending a telegram, in the sauna

Learn Finnish 9 - Renting an apartment

Learn Finnish 10 - Physical fitness, medicine, kinship

Learn Finnish 11 - Weather in the summer and winter

Learn Finnish 12 - Geography

Learn Finnish 13 - Holidays and church

Learn Finnish 14 - Finnish Society: Education, Government, Law and Justice, Social Security, National Anthem

About the Finnish Language

Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a Finnish dialect, are spoken. The Kven language, a Finnish dialect, is spoken in Northern Norway.

Finnish is the eponymous member of the Finnic language family and is typologically between fusional and agglutinative languages. Finnish modifies and inflects the forms of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs, depending on their roles in the sentence.