All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $168 without a textbook, as they no longer have it, our price is $19.95! And you actually get the textbook. If they had the textbook still, this course would cost aroung $220.

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

Learn Igbo 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 Igbo Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $168 from NTIS without the textbook as they no longer have it available. NTIS is 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 Igbo 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 FSI Igbo Language Course

FSI Igbo Language Course contains 9 hours of audio, and one textbook in PDF file format with 511 pages.

This course is based on the speech of two members of the Ezinehite group of Igbos in Central OWerri Province between the towns of OWerri and Umuahia, Eastern Nigeria. Their speech is representative "Central Igbo".

The essential phonological and grammatical structures of Igbo are presented within a small vocabulary. The omission of many common words is justified on the premise that, once the structure is grasped, vocabulary building can proceed apace. The words presented are however useful, lend themselves to the construction of natural though limited utterances, and exemplify all the phonemes of Igbo in representative environments. There are, if compounds and derivatives are not counted separately, about six hundred vocabulary items.

The course materials consist of four parts:

I. Tone Drills - a set of seventy-five exercises on the recognition of tone distinctions and patterns.

II. Twenty-four units (1-24) containing: a. Dialogues b. Notes c. Drills

III. Six units (25-30) containing: a. Dialogues b. Short Narratives

IV. Vocabulary

The course has been extensively revised and expanded since its experimental use in a twelve-week intensive class. In its present form, it can hardly be assimilated in less than 600 hours of time.

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.

About the Igbo Language

Igbo is a tone language, i.e. one which makes us of the pitch of the voice to make a difference to the meaining of the word or utterance. While the tonal nature of Igbo was identified late in the 19th century, it was only recently that people have come to correctly understand the typology of the Igbo tone system.

It is now known that Igbo belongs to the terraced level tone languages. Igbo has two distinctive tonemes, High, which is unmarked, and Low, marked, as well as the tonal phenomenon known as downstep.