All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $180, our price is $19.95!

 

 

 

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

 

Learn Kituba 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 Kituba Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $180 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 Kituba 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 Kituba Language Course

FSI Kituba Language Course contains 10 hours of audio, and one textbook in PDF file format with 497 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 Kituba 1 - Looking for work

Learn Kituba 2 - Greetings and salutations

Learn Kituba 3 - Introducing oneself

Learn Kituba 4 - Family

Learn Kituba 5 - Buying and selling

Learn Kituba 6 - A call

Learn Kituba 7 - Asking directions

Learn Kituba 8 - Help in the home

Learn Kituba 9 - A weeks's Activity

Learn Kituba 10 - A Fable

Learn Kituba 11 - A family

Learn Kituba 12 - A wedding invitation

Learn Kituba 13 - A visit to a Congolese home

Learn Kituba 14 - Talk about the house

Learn Kituba 15 - To buy or to rent

Learn Kituba 16 - In the kitchen

Learn Kituba 17 - Dinner is served

Learn Kituba 18 - Table talk

Learn Kituba 19 - The end of the evening

Learn Kituba 20 - Buying Clothes

Learn Kituba 21 - Getting some curios

Learn Kituba 22 - Talking shop

Learn Kituba 23 - Directions in Town

Learn Kituba 24 - On the train

Learn Kituba 25 - Getting set for a car trip

Learn Kituba 26 - Advice for the road

Learn Kituba 27 - Looking for servants

Learn Kituba 28 - An interview

Learn Kituba 29 - All in the day's work

Learn Kituba 30 - Child Care

Learn Kituba 31 - Cooking instruction

Learn Kituba 32 - An informal language lesson

Learn Kituba 33 - A health lesson from the radio

Learn Kituba 34 - Some French borrowings

Learn Kituba 35 - Some health rules

About the Kituba Language

Kituba, also known as Kikongo Ya Leta and Munukutuba, is a vehicular or trade language spoken along the lower reaches of the Congo and its tributaries. The course consists of a 'primer' in the language and subject-oriented groups of lessons. The primer is intended to introduce the major grammatical structures of the language, to develop in the support an adequate pronunciation, and to present a certain amount of useful vocabulary for a variety of situations. The subject-oriented lessons build on the vocabulary and grammar presented in the primer. Each unit in the primer consists of a short dialogue, variation drills, a vocabulary supplement, grammar notes, and grammar drills. In subsequent units, the dialogue is supplemented with a short narrative.

The Kituba language appears to have arisen out of a need for intercommunication between up-river Congolese tribes speaking diealects of Lingala etc. and lower-river tribes speaking primarily dialects of Kikongo. This process began before the advent of Europeans in the inland areas but was apparently a response to trading needs stimulated by the arrival of European traders on the coast. Thus at the time of its original development Kituba was a pidgin language, an alteration of primarily Kikongo to become creolized as some people came to use it in the home as their primary language. The number of people to whom it is the "native" language is probably still very small and the great majority of those who use this language also speak another, often several others.

The name of the language presents a problem. There are two main, mutually intelligible dialects. That of the eastern or Kwango-Kwilu region is called Kituba, in some sections, Kikongo in others, the latter name reflecting the absence of speakers of real tribal Kikongo in that area. In the western areas of Congo the language is most often called Kikongo ya Leta, Munukutuba. In this course, although it represents essentially the western dialect, we have chosen to follow Fehderau in selecting the shorter, more convenient and generally acceptable name.

Kituba has been associated with the Belgian colonial administration, since it proved useful to Europeans who found it easier to use than Kikongo or other tribal languages. For this reason there is some residual feeling that the use of Kituba is an indication of opposition to the nationalist aspiration of, especially, the Bakongo people. However, it provides a means of communicating with a large number of people, speakers of various Kikongo dialects and a variety of other languages, and in certain areas where the tribal linguistic picture is very complicated, it shows signs of increasing use.