All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $480, our price is $19.95!

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

Learn Hungarian Language Drills

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 Hungarian Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $480 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 Hungarian 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 only 4% 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 Hungarian Language Course

FSI Hungarian Language Course contains 31 hours of audio, and two textbooks in PDF file format with 623 pages.

The Hungarian Basic Course has been written with the aim of providing the student with a firm control of the basic structure of the spoken language and a vocabulary adequate for him to make limited practical use of both the spoken and written ,language in his travels, work and social obligations. In addition, "'the course should provide the learner a sound background for further development of fluency and proficiency in Hungarian.

The materials in each of the two volumes of the text are contained in twelve lessons or units. Each unit includes a set of basic sentences that are intended for memorization. These are in the form of conversations or dialogs focused on specific situations in which a person might find himself in Hungary. Notes to the basic sentences are added occasionally to provide additional background information on some cultural feature unfamiliar to Americans, or to clarify some special difficulty in vocabulary or idiom. Notes on pronunciation are included in each of the first seven units. Sound, stress and intonation features which have been found to be particularly troublesome for American students are here presented with explanations and a series of practice drills. The notes on grammar in each unit concentrate on those structural features illustrated in the basic sentences which are considered appropriate for analysis at a given stage in the course. The section after the grammatical explanations in each lesson provides for systematic and detailed practice of the new features comprising a particular unit. Specifically, the substitution drills are designed for exercise in the manipulation of forms through substitution of specific items in fixed sentence patterns. This practice is intended to build habits of association, so that in a given syntactic environment the appropriate grammatical form automatically comes to mind. A common type of substitution drill used in the drill sections is the transformation drill, in which the pattern sentence is changed from one grammatical or lexical category to another. 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 frame but in which most of the individual word items have been replaced. vocabulary drills provide practice in the use of new words and also allow for manipulation of sentence elements, the particular form and arrangement of which depends upon their association with that vocabulary item. The manipulation of all these drills as presented in the units is carried out generally with the use of English equivalents. Specific translation drills are also provided, however. In general these exercises supplement the material of the basic dialog in the form of a narrative. In this way they 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-type exercises on the situations of the basic dialogs but are also designed to develop the student's ability to give realistic answers to appropriate real-life situations. Conversation practice and additional situations in outline bridge the gap to free conversation.

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.

What Student's Say

Here's what students' say: "My main source is FSI because for me it is the best self-study guide that I can get given that most of my friends who are native Hungarian speakers live in Europe. I really want to become active in using Hungarian and listening to Hungarian radio or watching Hungarian TV is too passive for me right now. I tend to learn better when forced to write my sentences and say the things in a drill or to a friend....It works for me because FSI allows me to focus on oral and aural skills while the textbook is good for letting me write in Hungarian (the textbook has answers in the back, so I can always check my answers to the exercises in translation and "fill-in-the-blanks")...you will likely acquire a nearly-native accent, learn how to read and write in Hungarian, get a solid understanding of grammar and absorb a substantial amount of vocabulary."

" 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 Hungarian Language

Hungarian belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family, a group that includes both Finnish and Estonian, as well as several other lesser known languages. Although established in Europe for over a thousand years and thus subjected to the influence of Indo-European and Turkic languages, Hungarian or "Magyar" as it is known in Hungarian, has retained its Finnish-Ugric characteristics.

Hungarian is spoken by approximately 16 million people around the world. In addition to the 10 million speakers residing in Hungary, another two million speakers live in Transylvania or western Romania, and another four million are scattered mainly around Europe, North America and Australia.

Just as the other Finno-Ugric languages, Hungarian is an agglutinating language. This means that Hungarian adds suffixes onto the ends of the words that, in non-agglutinating languages, would be represented by seperate words. In the case of nouns, such endings include the possessive suffixes and locative or grammatical cases.

Hungarian maintains the absence of the verb "to have" and the lack of gender distinction. Possession is expressed by the verb "to be" with the object possessed bearing a possessive suffix and the possessor in the dative case. Another characteristic of Hungarian grammar is the use of postpositions as opposed to prepositions. Hungarian employs a phenomenon known as vowel harmony. By this it is meant that only front or back vowels can occur in any one word.

Hungarian is a language rich with complexities of grammar and expression. Thes characteristics can be both alluring and intimidating to those who experience it. "The Hungarian language is at one and the same time our softest cradle and our most solid coffin," lamented modern poet Gyula Illyes. Some have suggested that the flexibility of the tongue, combined with Hungary's linguistic isolation, has encouraged the cultures strong tradition of poetry and literature. Word order in Hungarian is fairly free, and it has been argued that this stimulates creative of experimental thinking. For this same reason, however, the Hungarian language is resistant to translation and much of the nations literary heritage is still unavailable to English speakers.

The Hungarian language my look daunting with its long words and unusual-looking accents, but it is surprisingly easy to pronounce. Like in English, Hungarian isn't always written the way it's pronounced. Hungarian vowels sounds are similiar to those found in the English words. The Hungarian alphabet has 44 letters and is based on the Latin alphabet. It includes accented letters and consonant combinations. Learning the patterns of Hungarian verbs is not difficult. The challenge is trying to learn all of the patterns plus all of the exceptions. In Hungarian, the endings of words mya change depending on their "case". The case of a word conveys grammatical information such as number, possession, location and the relationship between the noun and other parts of the sentence. It's formed by adding word ending, suffixes, to the nouns. Hungarian pronouns always vary according to their case, me, myself and I.