All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $200 for German Volume II, and they no longer have German Volume I available. We sell both German Volume I and II and our price is only $19.95!

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

Learn German 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 Learn German Language Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $200 from NTIS and that's for German Volume II, and they no longer have German Volume I available. NTIS is the United States printing service for audio/visual materials. 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 German Basic Course

It is the aim of the German course to provide the student with a useful control of the structure of the spoken language and of a basic vocabulary which meets at least some of the specialized needs of the Foreign Service. After completion of the basic course the student should be able to make limited practical use of the language in his official duties and social obligations. He will furthermore have the means, given the proper surroundings and personal motivation, for continued rapid and efficient development of proficiency.

The German materials in this first volume of the text are organized into twelve lessons or units. Each unit contains a set of basic sentences for memorization. These are in the form of a dialog based on one or sometimes two specific situations in which a person might find himself in Germany. Notes to the basic sentences are provided as necessary to clarify occasional difficulties in vocabulary and idiom and to provide additional background on some cultural features unfamiliar to Americans. Notes on pronunciation are included in each of the first eight units. Phonological features which have been found to be particularly difficult for American students are here presented with explanations and pronunciation practice drills. The notes on grammar in each unit single out those structural features illustrated in the basic sentences which are appropriate for systematic consideration at that stage in the course. Substitution drills provide for the manipulation of forms by substituting specific items in fixed sentence frames. They are intended to build habits of association, so that in a given syntactic environment the appropriate grammatical form automaticallycomes to mind. As the German vocabulary is all familiar, no English equivalents are given in these drills. Variation drills provide for the manipulation of larger syntactic patterns. In each group a model sentence, underscored, serves as a guide. Associated with it are additional sentences incorporating the same syntactic pattern but in which most of the individual word items have been replaced. English equivalents are given to serve as cues for recall of the German variant sentences. Vocabulary drills provide both practice in the use of new vocabulary items and also allow for manipulation of sentence elements whose particular form and arrangement depends upon their association with that vocabulary item. The manipulation of both variation and vocabulary drills depends on the use of English equivalents. Specific translation drills are also provided, however. In most cases they present the material of the basic dialog in the form of a narrative. They thus provide content review of the basic sentences and practice in the transformation from active dialog to descriptive narration. The response drills are question and answer drills on the situations of the basic dialogs. Conversation practice and additional situations in outline bridge the gap to free conversation with small pieces of supplementary dialog for acting out and situations providing for a freer play of the student's imagination.

This is a course in Spoken German, the forms and patterns of the language are intentionally colloquial. The emphasis in instruction is everywhere on speech, and an indispensable component of the learning process is the voice of the instructor on the audio material, whose native language is German. On no account should the student attempt to use these materials without the audio recordings. The method of instruction incorporates guided imitation, repetition, memorization, pattern practice, and conversation.

Learn German 1 - Greetings: Hello, Good morning, Good evening

Learn German 2 - The Allens are American and Mr. Allen is a Foreign Service Officer

Learn German 3 - Shall we go to town today?

Learn German 4 - Mr. Kohler want to apply for a visitor's visa for America

Learn German 5 - The Wilson's have an apartment on the second floor

Learn German 6 - The telephone rings the American Consulate

Learn German 7 - Moving into their new house

Learn German 8 - I have to do some shopping

Learn German 9 - Driving on the Autobahn

Learn German 10 - A resort in the mountains

Learn German 11 - Did he sleep overnight?

Learn German 12 - How long have you been here?

Learn German 13 - Have you been to the exhibition?

Learn German 14 - Yesterday evening, the train, to accompany

Learn German 15 - to meet one another, the paved embankment, roadway, the drive

Learn German 16 - I'm glad, to welcome, say hello to

Learn German 17 - the street where the stores are located

Learn German 18 - to work on the thing, nevertheless, just the same

Learn German 19 - An applicant in the Visa section

Learn German 20 - At the box office

Learn German 21 - In the political section of the American Embassy

Learn German 22 - I was told that the cars in Germany had semaphores

Learn German 23 - The trade center

Learn German 24 - This unit deals with the written form of the language

Here's what users say:

"I think the course is great and is the best thing I've found by far. I feel like when I complete this course that I will be able to speak German pretty well."

"I have found that going through FSI German 1 is a good experience, even though the grammar points are very simple. Overall, FSI German isn't about learning grammar, it's about developing automaticity in the language, and having Level 1 will give you more drills than just having Level 2. However, even using just Level 2 is fine. Some of the vocabulary is arcane or outdated, but it's good for grammar, and since you are doing so many drills (and can repeat, as necessary), it won't be over your head."

" I think a big part of the fame of the FSI courses lies in the fact that they work even for people who don't have much language learning skill or experience."

About the German Language

German is spoken as a first language by approximately 110 million people who live mainly in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. But German is spoken elsewhere - for instance in Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, the South Tyrol region of Italy and in border regions of Belgium. German speaking communities are also found in Eastern Europe, particulary in Romania, in North America, the Pennsylvania Dutch, and in Southern Africa, Namibia.

After English, German is the most widely spoken language within the European Union and is an important language in business and commerce, particulary in Eastern Europe.

It might be a surprise to know that German is, in fact, a close relative of English. English, German and Dutch are all know as West Germanic languages. A primary reason why English and German have grown apart is the Normans, on invading England in 1066, brought with them a large number of non-Germanic words. This caused English to have lots of synonyms, with the more basic word being Germanic.

German pronunciation is relatively straightforward and uncomplicated. Each letter, or combination of letters, is pronounced consistently. German vowels can be long or short. Although short vowels are straightforward, longer vowels can produce problems. Most German consonants are similiar to their English counterparts. One important difference is that b, d and g sound like "p", "t" and "k", respectively at the end of a word or syllable. Nouns in German have three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.