All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $140, our price is $19.95!

 

 

 

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

 

Learn Luganda 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 Luganda Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $140 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 Luganda 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 14% 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 Luganda Basic Course

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 Luganda Pronunciation

A non-native speaker of Luganda will find that his Luganda is much more intelligible if he learns to handle pitch and length as integral parts of the language. 'Pitch' refers to height on a musical scale, and 'length' to duration in time. The surface units of duration are consonants and vowels, either of which may be single (short) or double (long). The surface units of pitch are three tones: high, low and drop. Learning to produce these units is relatively simple. What is not simple in this particular language is remembering when to use which tone. The purpose of this Synopsis is to pull together into one continuous whole all of the information that we have about pitch and duration. References back to the Synopsis are made at appropriate points throughout the Lessons themselves.

One way to describe the use of pitch and duration in Luganda would be to record the patterns used with each form of each verb and each noun, and with each sequence of two or more words, and then classify these patterns without attempting to state how they are related to one another. This kind of summary has in fact been done elsewhere, but the results have still been too complex to be of much immediate help to the ordinary learner. Our approach in this Synopsis will be to concentrate on the regularities that lie beneath the enormous complexity of the surface patterns.

One can predict the pitches and durations of any Luganda sentence if one has four kinds of information about it: (a) the vowels and consonants in each of the smallest meaningful parts of each word, (b) whether each mora (length-unit) is 'marked' or not: (c) the grammatical constructions within the sentence, and (d) whether each pause is at the end of a statement, or at the end of a yes-no question, or at the end of some other kind of question, or is somewhere other than at the end of the sentence. As one moves from this information to the actual tones themselves, it is useful to think in terms of some intermediate units, called 'word boundary'.

Learn Luganda 1 - What's your name?

Learn Luganda 2 - What's your name?

Learn Luganda 3 - Where are you from?

Learn Luganda 4 - I don't know?

Learn Luganda 5 - Yes, no, isn't

Learn Luganda 6 - Wangi?

Learn Luganda 7 - Do you understand?

Learn Luganda 8 - Is that so?

Learn Luganda 9 - Present indicative negative

Learn Luganda 10 - is a

Learn Luganda 11 - What part of Uganda is it in?

Learn Luganda 12 - Talking about places in Uganda

Learn Luganda 13 - Review

Learn Luganda 14 - Morning greeting

Learn Luganda 15 - Midday or evening greeting

Learn Luganda 16 - Midday and evening greetings

Learn Luganda 17 - Equational sentences for first, second and third person, singular

Learn Luganda 18 - Peronal pronouns, plural

Learn Luganda 19 - Question and Answers with the verb 'beera'

Learn Luganda 20 - Oral test

Learn Luganda 21 - Where do you live?

Learn Luganda 22 - Getting acquainted, personal possessives

Learn Luganda 23 - A series of everyday activities

Learn Luganda 24 - More everyday activities

Learn Luganda 25 - Getting acquainted, titles of address

Learn Luganda 26 - Hours of the day

Learn Luganda 27 - Present indicative negative

Learn Luganda 28 - Getting acquainted, Adjective as nucleus of sentence

Learn Luganda 29 - Times of day connected with appropriate activities

Learn Luganda 30 - Minutes after the hour

Learn Luganda 31 - Getting acquainted, Ordinal numbers

Learn Luganda 32 - What is it?

Learn Luganda 33 - Perfective indicative affirmative

Learn Luganda 34 - Getting acquainted. Concord of numerals with nouns

Learn Luganda 35 - to have, affirmative and negative

Learn Luganda 36 - There is

Learn Luganda 37 - Getting acquainted. Concord of numerals with nouns

Learn Luganda 38 - Text 1: Cities of Uganda: Kampala 'such as'

Learn Luganda 39 - Classroom activities

Learn Luganda 40 - Parts of the day

Learn Luganda 41 - Getting acquainted, and, with

Learn Luganda 42 - Text 2: Cities of Uganda: Masindi

Learn Luganda 43 - Near past indicative affirmative

Learn Luganda 44 - Near past indicative negative

Learn Luganda 45 - Getting acquainted, Interrogative Ki? after nouns

Learn Luganda 46 - Text 3: Cites of Uganda: Mbarara

Learn Luganda 47 - Dropping the initial vowel in the negative

Learn Luganda 48 - Far past indicative affirmative

Learn Luganda 49 - Getting acquainted

Learn Luganda 50 - Text 4: Cities of Uganda: Soroti

Learn Luganda 51 - Far past indicative negative

Learn Luganda 52 - New vocabulary

Learn Luganda 53 - Is the master at home?

Learn Luganda 54 - Text 5: Cities of Uganda: Mbale

Learn Luganda 55 - Object infixes with the present tense

Learn Luganda 56 - Imperatives

Learn Luganda 57 - Is the man of the house home?

Learn Luganda 58 - Imperatives

Learn Luganda 59 - Subjunctives

Learn Luganda 60 - Subjunctives with object of infix

Learn Luganda 61 - Is the women of the house home?

Learn Luganda 62 - Text 7: Cities of Uganda: Fort Portal

Learn Luganda 63 - Near future indicative affirmative

Learn Luganda 64 - Near future with object infixes

Learn Luganda 65 - Leaving a message. Negative imperatives

Learn Luganda 66 - Text 8: Cities of Uganda, Masaka

Learn Luganda 67 - Near future indicative negative

Learn Luganda 68 - General future

Learn Luganda 69 - Greetings after a long absence

Learn Luganda 70 - Text 9: Cities of Uganda: Mityana

Learn Luganda 71 - General future indicative negative

Learn Luganda 72 - The suffix, nga, with near future

Learn Luganda 73 - Fish or meat?

Learn Luganda 74 - Text 10: Eating schedules in Buganda. Narrative construction with ne

Learn Luganda 75 - Future imperative

Learn Luganda 76 - Future imperative negative, thou shalt never

Learn Luganda 77 - What a pretty place!

Learn Luganda 78 - Text 11: The difference between ena and emmere

Learn Luganda 79 - Subjunctive negative construction with, lema

Learn Luganda 80 - Subjunctive copula

Learn Luganda 81 - What is ther to eat? Quoted speech with, ti.

Learn Luganda 82 - Text 12: Eating schedules again

Learn Luganda 83 - Adjectives

Learn Luganda 84 - Negative relative

Learn Luganda 85 - What shall we eat?

Learn Luganda 86 - Text 13: Eating schedules again. The not-yet tense

Learn Luganda 87 - The TU class

Learn Luganda 88 - Have never!

Learn Luganda 89 - Let's eat

Learn Luganda 90 - Text 14: Travel between Kampala and Entebbe

Learn Luganda 91 - The verb, were, 'amount to'

Learn Luganda 92 - Duration of time

Learn Luganda 93 - Do you eat matooke? Compound adjectives

Learn Luganda 94 - Travel between Entebbe and Kapala

About the Luganda Language

Luganda, is the major language of Uganda, spoken by over sixteen million Ganda and other people mainly in Southern Uganda, including the capital Kampala. It belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo language family. Typologically, it is a highly agglutinating language with subject-verb-object word order and nominative-accusative morphosyntactic alignment.

With about seven million first-language-speakers in the Buganda region and about ten million others with a working knowledge, it is the most widely spoken Ugandan language, and as second language it follows English and precedes Swahili. The language is used in some primary schools in Buganda as pupils begin to learn English, the primary official language of Uganda. Until the 1960s, Luganda was also the official language of instruction in primary schools in Eastern Uganda.

A notable feature of Luganda phonology is its geminate consonants and distinctions between long and short vowels. Speakers generally consider consonantal gemination and vowel lengthening to be two manifestations of the same effect, which they call simply "doubling" or "stressing".

Luganda is also a tonal language; the change in the pitch of a syllable can change the meaning of a word. For example the word kabaka means 'king' if all three syllables are given the same pitch. If the first syllable is high then the meaning changes to 'the little one catches'. This feature makes Luganda a difficult language for speakers of non-tonal languages to learn. A non-native speaker has to learn the variations of pitch by prolonged listening.