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

 

 

 

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

 

Learn Twi 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 FSI Twi Language 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 FSI Twi 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 Twi Language Course

FSI Twi Language Course contains 6 hours of audio, and one textbook in PDF file format with 239 pages.

Each of the twenty lessons begins with a Basic Dialogue which forms the core of the lesson. A student controls a lesson to the extent to which he has learned the dialogue by heart. Thorough memorization of the dialogue means thorough mastery of the text. Memorization is achieved by direct imitation of the audio material.

Basic Dialogues are presented with their English equivalents. Numbered utterances in the dialogues are basic sentences. New words or phrases occuring in a basic sentence for the first time are listed separately, immediately before the sentence, as breakdowns. They are intendented and not numbered.

The audio which accompanies these lessons includes as Basic Dialogues, Drills, and Supplements. The material is recorded with a "beep" signal that tells the students step by step what to do:

1: One short beep means - Listen

2: One long beep means - Repeat

3: Two short beeps means - Participate

4: Two long beeps means - Redo the same segment

The dialogue is taught in segments first, then as a whole. The steps involved are:

1: Listening

2: Memorizing by repetition of break-downs and whole sentences

3: Developing fluency by additional repetition of whole sentences

4: Participating by assuming one role in the dialogue,

5: Confirming comprehension by re-listening.

During the fourth step, when a student participates in a segment of the dialogue, his utterances are confirmed on the audio immediately following the space provided for his participation.

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 Twi Language Basic Course Table of Contents

Learn Twi 1 - Use of drills, Sound drills

Learn Twi 2 - Greetings

Learn Twi 3 - Do you speak Twi?

Learn Twi 4 - How do you say?

Learn Twi 5 - At the office

Learn Twi 6 - Fufu

Learn Twi 7 - Buying Fish

Learn Twi 8 - At the Doctor's

Learn Twi 9 - Have you gone to eat yet?

Learn Twi 10 - I went to Accra yesterday

Learn Twi 11 - An job interview

Learn Twi 12 - What time is it?

Learn Twi 13 - How much is this?

Learn Twi 14 - The telephone

Learn Twi 15 - The bus

Learn Twi 16 - The gas station

Learn Twi 17 - Directions to the market

Learn Twi 18 - The cocoa farm

Learn Twi 19 - What will you do if it rains?

Learn Twi 20 - Taking leave

About the Twi Language

Asante Twi is the most widely spoken of the dialects of the Akan language. Akan is spoken by about 44 percent of Ghana's population as a first language by people living in the Ashanti Region and in parts of the Eastern, Western, Central, Volta, and Brong Ahafo Regions of the country. On account of its central geographical location among the dialects of Akan, Asante Twi is easily understood by speakers of the other Akan dialects. It is one of three literary dialects of Akan, the others being Akuapem Twi, spoken in parts of the Eastern Region, and Fante, spoken in the Central and parts of the Western Regions of Ghana.

Akuapem Twi, is a tone language. It is one of the major dialects/languages of the Akan family of languages. It is spoken by the people of the Akuapem traditional area. Akropong is the capital town of the Akuapem traditional area.

Until fairly recently, literacy in "Twi" was synonymous with literacy in Akuapem Twi. This is due to the work of the Basel Missionaries who introduced Christianity to the area in 1835, and introduced a written version of the "language" in 1842. Akropong became the craddle of the Presbyterian Church.

The most effective way to learn a new language is to practice speaking it as often as possible. It is hoped that anyone interested in learning to speak Twi will look out for Twi speakers and try to pratice the language with them. In Ghana, most traders in the urban centers and taxi drivers speak Twi, and the learner who happens to be in the country is advised to try and communicate with them in Twi.