All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $168 our price is $19.95!

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

Learn Nyanja 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 Chinyanja Language Course, as you can see, sells for $220 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 Chinyanja Language 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 Nyanja Language Course

FSI Nyanja Language Course contains 9 hours of audio, and one textbook in PDF file format with 374 pages.

Chinyanja 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.

Chinyanja 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.

Chinyanja, the principal language of Malawi, is spoken not only in that country but by large numbers of Malawians in neighboring countries. This course is intended to give the student a start in the Chinyanja language, both by providing them with materials for study, and by guiding them in taking over more and more of the responsibilities connected with language learning. The goal is the ability to speak a little Chinyanja well, and ability to learn much more of it as is needed for individual work situations in Malawi.

Speakers of English who are studying Chinyanja find the pronunciation less difficult than it is confusing. Chinyanja has no "clicks", no ''whistling z's" and no "coarticulated stops", yet published descriptions of the consonant sounds of the language leave the would-be learner in doubt at some crucial points.

An example from English may help to make the problem clearer. Suppose that a speaker of some other language has learned to pronounce English top in two ways: in both pronunciations he closes his lips in order to form the 'p'. In one, he allows his lips to open immediately thereafter, and a small puff of air escapes: in the other he keeps his lips closed indefinitely. Each pronunciation is quite common in normal spoken English. His question is, 'how important is this physical difference? Are there some words in which only one of these is correct, and other words in which the other is required? Or may I just forget about the difference and use these two sounds intercnangeably?" The answer, of course, is that the two are interchangeable. For that reason, we need not and do not represent the difference when we write. But the same student of English may find the physical difference between tie and die just as subtle as the difference between the two pronunciations of top. Yet native speakers of English do not interchange the sounds that begin these two words. The foreign learner of English must keep them apart from one another: and the difference is reflected in our spelling by the fact that we have the two separate letters t and d.

Returning now to Chinyanja, the student will hear sounds that resemble the dz in adze, and others that are similar to the z sound in as. He has no serious difficulty in making either one of them, but he still needs to know what status this physical difference has within Nyanja. Are there some words where he must use dz and not z, and others where z is right and dz wrong? Or may he forget about the physical difference and use the two sounds interchangeably? And what about a p-like sound with no aspiration (puff of air) after it, and a p-like sound that is followed by strong aspiration? How much attention should he pay to this difference?

Learn Chinyanja Language Course TOC

Learn Nyanja 1 - What is your name?

Learn Nyanja 2 - Where are you from?

Learn Nyanja 3 - Where is your present home?

Learn Nyanja 4 - When did you arrive

Learn Nyanja 5 - When did you arrive

Learn Nyanja 6 - When di you arrive

Learn Nyanja 7 - By what mode of transportation did you arrive

Learn Nyanja 8 - How old are you?

Learn Nyanja 9 - When were you born?

Learn Nyanja 10 - Where were you born?

Learn Nyanja 11 - Where do your parents live

Learn Nyanja 12 - Do you have any brothers and sisters

Learn Nyanja 13 - Are you married?

Learn Nyanja 14 - Do you have any children

Learn Nyanja 15 - What kind of work do you plan to do?

Learn Nyanja 16 - Do you like it here?

Learn Nyanja 17 - How long are you going to stay here?

Learn Nyanja 18 - Where are you living at present?

Learn Nyanja 19 - Is this yours?

Learn Nyanja 20 - Good morning, where are you going?

Learn Nyanja 21 - Are you going to the market

Learn Nyanja 22 - Do you have a wife

Learn Nyanja 23 - Where do you live, Mwanza.

Learn Nyanja 24 - Where do you live, Mwanza.

Learn Nyanja 25 - A younger friend comes to visit an old man

Learn Nyanja 26 - Are you going to Limbe today?

Learn Nyanja 27 - I'm glad to see her

Learn Nyanja 28 - Peter has just arrived at the home of a friend

Learn Nyanja 29 - Hello, did you have trouble getting here?

Learn Nyanja 30 - Being introduced to people

Learn Nyanja 31 - Are you married

Learn Nyanja 32 - I've come to see you

Learn Nyanja 33 - Do you speak Nyanja?

Learn Nyanja 34 - There are some young men teaching Nyanja

Learn Nyanja 35 - I speak a little, no this is not my language

Learn Nyanja 36 - A European asks about local languages in the vicinity of Malawi

Learn Nyanja 37 - Where do you live, I live three villages from here

Learn Nyanja 38 - I live in Mwanza

Learn Nyanja 39 - Useful questions and answers

Learn Nyanja 40 - Useful questions and answers

Learn Nyanja 41 - A Peace corp volunteer is asked about his work

Learn Nyanja 42 - A Peace corp asks an aquaintance about his work

Learn Nyanja 43 - Two fellow workers look forward to quitting time

Learn Nyanja 44 - Just arrived into town and looking for work

Learn Nyanja 45 - Still looking for work

Learn Nyanja 46 - How's the work going

Learn Nyanja 47 - A conversation on the way home from work

Learn Nyanja 48 - Prospect of a business trip out of town

Learn Nyanja 49 - Plans for the evening

Learn Nyanja 50 - Street and road directions

Learn Nyanja 51 - Road directions

Learn Nyanja 52 - Directions to a rural school

Learn Nyanja 53 - Directions within a town

Learn Nyanja 54 - An unsuccessful attempt to get directions

Learn Nyanja 55 - October weather in Malawi

Learn Nyanja 56 - December weather in Malawi

Learn Nyanja 57 - Febuary weather in Malawi

Learn Nyanja 58 - April weather in Malawi

Learn Nyanja 59 - June weather in Malawi

Learn Nyanja 60 - August weather in Malawi

Learn Nyanja 61 - Buying maize

Learn Nyanja 62 - Buying peas

Learn Nyanja 63 - Buying tomatoes