All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $220, our price is $19.95!

 

 

 

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

 

Learn Hausa 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 Hausa Basic 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 Hausa 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 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 Hausa Basic Course

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.

The Grammatical Drill section of each unit gives exercises which are to furnish the student with considerable practice on the main point or grammar discussed in the unit. They also review earlier material. While extensive, they are not exhaustive, and may be supplemented when the text is used. Care should be taken not to introduce any new vocabulary or constructions in supplementary drill. Occasional new words are used in the drills of the later units. These, however, are introduced very sparingly. They will help accustom the student to hear new items which they must try to understand by context only. Translations of these are added on the side of the page, even when they are words which will occur later in the units.

Learn Hausa 1 - Greetings

Learn Hausa 2 - Any news?

Learn Hausa 3 - Directions

Learn Hausa 4 - Messages

Learn Hausa 5 - Workers

Learn Hausa 6 - Inquiries

Learn Hausa 7 - More Inquiries

Learn Hausa 8 - We'll visit you

Learn Hausa 9 - Going?

Learn Hausa 10 - Go to the market

Learn Hausa 11 - Not going

Learn Hausa 12 - Finding someone

Learn Hausa 13 - Going after something

Learn Hausa 14 - You know?

Learn Hausa 15 - Going away to study

Learn Hausa 16 - Medicine, Expecting

Learn Hausa 17 - Malingering

Learn Hausa 18 - Trying to collect

Learn Hausa 19 - Tree cutting

Learn Hausa 20 - Let's go somewhere

Learn Hausa 21 - Let's go to the game

Learn Hausa 22 - What color do you want?

Learn Hausa 23 - Bikes for Tikes

Learn Hausa 24 - Telling Time

Learn Hausa 25 - Around home

Learn Hausa 26 - Chitchat

Learn Hausa 27 - Save your money

Learn Hausa 28 - Foot in mouth

Learn Hausa 29 - Asking Around

Learn Hausa 30 - At the office in the Morning

About the Hausa Language

Hausa is the major language of the Northern Region of Nigeria. It is also spoken by scattered groups of Hausas and as a trade language in large areas of West Africa. Aside from its recognized importance as a practical means of communicatlon, it is also of interest from the purely linguistic point of view. It is the best known representatlve of the Chad branch of the Hamito-Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) family of languages. The other branches of this family are Berber, Egyptlan (extinct), Cushitic and Semitic. Hausa is thus genetically related to such well-known languages as ancient hieroglyphic Egyptian, Assyro-Babylonian (Akkadian), Hebrew and Arabic, as well as to others less familiar but also of importance, such as Amharic and Somali.

Hausa is the first language of the more than twelve million members of the Hausa tribe. It is spoken as a second language by perhaps ten to fifteen million non-Hausas having become the lingua franca of Northern Nigeria and contiguous ares of Niger Republic. Hausa is the largest and is generally regarded as the most important West African language.

Hausa is classified as a member of the Chadic group of the Afroasiatic family of languages. Hausa is, therefore, more closely related to Arabic and Hebrew than are most of the rest of the languages of sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, there has been extensive Muslim influence on the Hausa language and culture and, as a result, considerable vocabulary borrowing from Arabic.

Hausa Pronunciation

The basic units of sound in a language are the phonemes. In Hausa there are 25 consonant phonemes, 5 vowel phonemes each occurring long and short, and 2 tone phonemes.

Hausa has an intonational system as well and involves the specifying and modification of the pitch levels employed in the tonal system. Hausa Intonation applies to whole utterances, not to single words.