All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $240, our price is $19.95!

 

 

 

 

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

 

Learn Kirundi 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 Kirundi Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $240 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 Kirundi 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 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 FSI Kirundi Language Course

FSI Kirundi Language Course contains 12 hours of audio, and one textbook in PDF file format with 588 pages.

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.

Learn Kirundi 1 - Exchange greetings and getting acquainted

Learn Kirundi 2 - Looking for work

Learn Kirundi 3 - Where do people live and work?

Learn Kirundi 4 - Getting help in the language

Learn Kirundi 5 - Arranging for help in language study

Learn Kirundi 6 - Comparing notes about the language study

Learn Kirundi 7 - Family relationships

Learn Kirundi 8 - More about family relationships

Learn Kirundi 9 - More about family relationships

Learn Kirundi 10 - Review

Learn Kirundi 11 - Getting street directions

Learn Kirundi 12 - More street directions

Learn Kirundi 13 - Planning a short trip

Learn Kirundi 14 - Buying food

Learn Kirundi 15 - Buying clothing

Learn Kirundi 16 - Buying food at the door

Learn Kirundi 17 - Eating

Learn Kirundi 18 - Work in the kitchen

Learn Kirundi 19 - Restaurant and kitchen

Learn Kirundi 20 - Review

Learn Kirundi 21 - Caring for children

Learn Kirundi 22 - Climate and weather

Learn Kirundi 23 - Seasonal crops

Learn Kirundi 24 - The geography of Burundi

Learn Kirundi 25 - A visit to a friend's home

Learn Kirundi 26 - Car trouble

Learn Kirundi 27 - The government of Burundi

Learn Kirundi 28 - Miscellaneous topics

Learn Kirundi 29 - Short dialogues

Learn Kirundi 30 - Short texts, with questions and answers

About the Kirundi Language

Kirundi is the principal language of Burundi. It shares a high degree of mutual intelligibility with Kinyarwanda, the language of Rwanda. Considered together, the cluster Kirundi Kinyarwanda ranks third among Bantu languages, after Swahili and Lingala, with respect to number of speakers. There are however two important differences between Swahili and Lingala on the one hand and Kirundi-Kinyarwanda on the other: (1) Swahili and Lingala are spoken over very wide areas, and a high proportion of their speakers have some other Bantu language as the mother tongue; Kirundi-Kinyarwanda is spoken in a relatively small area, as the first language. (2) Swahili and Lingala are relatively free of troublesome complexities for the learner; Kirundi and Kinyarwanda are full of them. The two books in this series which are concerned with Swahili and Lingala set out the grammar of those languages in the form of a series of individual notes, distributed throughout the units of the course. The present volume presents the details of Kirundi grammar in the same way. In addition, however, this synopsis has been prepared, first of all to provide orientation for those who plan to use the entire book, and secondarily for the student whose desire is to learn as much as possible about the language in the shortest time. Only the most important features of the grammar are mentioned at all, and the vocabulary used in the examples has intentionally been kept small. The exercises, with answers given in square brackets at the right, are not intended to make this synopsis into an auto-instructional program, but only to give the reader an opportunity to participate if he desires to do so, and to keep constant check on his understanding of the text.