All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $405, and they no longer offer the textbook for Volume II, our price for both Volume I & II is $19.95!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

Learn Korean Language Course I

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 Korean Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $405 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, and they no longer offer the textbook for Volume II. We purchased the material from NTIS, as evidenced by the screenshot provided of the original Korean Basic Course Audio Cassettes, and did the remastering work. We had the textbooks professionally digitized into a PDF file. And then we spent countless hours remastering the cassettes to a digital form, now we are providing this course to you for less than 5% 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 Korean Language Course

FSI Korean Language Course contains 24 hours of audio, and two textbooks in PDF file format with 1129 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.

This is the first of two volumes designed to teach spoken Korean to English speakers. The Korean presented in this book is representative of the 'standard' speech of educated Koreans in Seoul, which has been the capital city and cultural, educational and political center of the country for over five hundred years. In Korea, as in every other nation, there is considerable local variation in pronunciation and vocabulary as well as in styles of speech. However, in schools all over Korea the language presented here is used and taught as the national standard and, if you learn it well, you will be speaking a form of Korean which has prestige throughout the country and which will be understood everywhere.

Acquiring proficiency in the use of language is like acquiring proficiency in any other skill, for example, driving an automobile-- you must practice until the mechanics of driving - or speaking - are reflex. It is the aim of this course, therefore, to bring students to 'automacity' in speaking and understanding everyday Korean.

Each unit in Korean Basic Course Volume 1 (Units 1-18) consists of four major parts: Basic Dialogues or other 'basic sentences 1 , Notes on Dialogues, Grammar Notes, Drills and Exercises.

Learn Korean 1 - Greetings

Learn Korean 2 - Finding One's way around

Learn Korean 3 - Finding One's way around

Learn Korean 4 - Shopping

Learn Korean 5 - Shopping

Learn Korean 6 - Telling Time

Learn Korean 7 - Telling Time

Learn Korean 8 - Talking about one's work

Learn Korean 9 - Going to the movies

Learn Korean 10 - Going around the town

Learn Korean 11 - Going around the town

Learn Korean 12 - Eating and drinking

Learn Korean 13 - Eating and drinking

Learn Korean 14 - Talking about one's life and family

Learn Korean 15 - Talking about one's life and family

Learn Korean 16 - Telephoning

Learn Korean 17 - Telephoning

Learn Korean 18 - Talking about the weather

Learn Korean 19 - At Seoul Station

Learn Korean 20 - At Seoul Station

Learn Korean 21 - At the ticke window

Learn Korean 22 - On the train

Learn Korean 23 - At Taejon Inn

Learn Korean 24 - At Taejon Inn

Learn Korean 25 - Room service

Learn Korean 26 - Giving errands to the Inn Maid

Learn Korean 27 - Reading Signs

Learn Korean 28 - Reading Signs

Learn Korean 29 - Going Out for a Drive

Learn Korean 30 - At the service station

Learn Korean 31 - Haircut

Learn Korean 32 - Visiting the Patient at the Hospital

Learn Korean 33 - Visiting the Patient at the Hospital

Learn Korean 34 - Invitation

Learn Korean 35 - Invitation

Learn Korean 36 - Invitation

Learn Korean 37 - Educational System

Learn Korean 38 - Educational System

Learn Korean 39 - Discussing One's Occupation

Learn Korean 40 - Discussing One's Occupation

Learn Korean 41 - Going out on the countryside

Learn Korean 42 - Going out on the countryside

Learn Korean 43 - Society and Social Life

Learn Korean 44 - Society and Social Life

Learn Korean 45 - Military Service

Learn Korean 46 - Military Service

Learn Korean 47 - Government and Politics

About the Korean Language

Korean is the official language of Korea, both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing system was commissioned by Sejong the Great, the system being currently called Hangul. Prior to the development of Hangul, Koreans had used Hanja and phonetic systems like Hyangchal, Gugyeol and Idu extensively for over a millennium.