All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $320, our price is $19.95!

 

 

 

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

 

Learn Fula 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 Learn Fula Language Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $320 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 Fula 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 6% 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 Fula Basic Course

The Fula Basic Course consists of forty numbered units, three review units, and a glossary. Each unit includes a dialogue or other basic sentences and variation drills on basic sentences including certain vocabulary. In addition, many units also contain grammar notes, drills on the grammar notes, narratives, and questions and topics for discussion.

The first twenty units have a review unit after each of the first three of four five-unit groups. This portion contains most of the grammatical exposition in the course and also the majority of the manipulative drill material. The remaining units 21 - 40 contain relatively little grammatical explanation and drill, being devoted to dialog and narrative texts with exercises mainly based upon theme.

Each dialog consists of ten to fifteen short utterances. These are presented at normal speed and the student repeats the utterances in imitation of the instructor.

On the audio recordings, each dialog is recorded three times. The first recording, called "Dialog for Listening," is at normal speed without spaces or repetition. The student listens to this recording several times with his book openand gets the general meaning of the dialog exchange. The student then proceeds directly to the second recording, called "Dialog for Learning". In this portion, each sentence is repeated and spaces are provided for student repetition. The final recording is called "Dialogue for Fluency". The sentences are recorded once each with spaces between.

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-listing.

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 Fula Language Basic Course Table of Contents

Learn Fula Language 1 - Morning Greetings

Learn Fula Language 2 - Afternoon Greetings

Learn Fula Language 3 - Additional Morning Greetings

Learn Fula Language 4 - Additional Afternoon Greetings

Learn Fula Language 5 - Useful Classroom Expressions

Learn Fula Language 6 - Reviw of Learn Fula Languages 1 - 5

Learn Fula Language 7 - A remedy for a headache

Learn Fula Language 8 - Yompa's wife is sick

Learn Fula Language 9 - An accident on the road

Learn Fula Language 10 - Inquiring about a job

Learn Fula Language 11 - Visitors

Learn Fula Language 12 - What day will he be here?

Learn Fula Language 13 - Livestock

Learn Fula Language 14 - At the market

Learn Fula Language 15 - Weather

Learn Fula Language 16 - At the Butcher's

Learn Fula Language 17 - Kumba's Child is Cold

Learn Fula Language 18 - Fatu returns from the market

Learn Fula Language 19 - Cooking fish

Learn Fula Language 20 - Frank learns the value of money

Learn Fula Language 21 - Koba, the okra salesman

Learn Fula Language 22 - What's for lunch?

Learn Fula Language 23 - A snack and an errand

Learn Fula Language 24 - Lots to Do

Learn Fula Language 25 - Qalfa does some chores

Learn Fula Language 26 - Asking directions

Learn Fula Language 27 - Frank's car has a Breakdown

Learn Fula Language 28 - Kumba's baby was sick

Learn Fula Language 29 - Frank is interested in farming

Learn Fula Language 30 - Kumba's daughter is getting married

Learn Fula Language 31 - Ramadan is coming

Learn Fula Language 32 - Buying clothes

Learn Fula Language 33 - A visit to the dispensary

Learn Fula Language 34 - Going to the Bantanto Village

Learn Fula Language 35 - The teacher misbehaves

Learn Fula Language 36 - Frank does some vocabulary learning

Learn Fula Language 37 - The case of the mistaken drunk driver

Learn Fula Language 38 - Dgay wants to register his child in school

Learn Fula Language 39 - News of Friends and family

Learn Fula Language 40 - Renting a house

About the Fula Language

Fula (also known as Peul, Fulani, etc.) is widely spoken throughout the grassland areas of West Africa from the Atlantic to Cameroun. It has been extensively studied by scholars interested in its linguistic structure or in the ethnography and culture of its speakers. Few of these studies are of much assistance to the beginning student of the language. The present brier introduction to the essentials of Sene-Gambian Fula is designed to provide the basic grammatical structures likely to be needed early in the student's experience with Fula, plus a more generalized 'feel' for the structure of the language, in the context of a limted vocabulary, likely to prove userul in everyday situations.

Fula (variously also called, in European languages, Fulani, Peul, Poular, Toucouleur, Fulfulde) is the language of the Fulbe (singular Pullo), cattle raising and farming peoples of Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroun and adjacent areas in other states. The people are generally referred to by the term applied to their language.

In none of the countries where they live do the Fula people form a majority. The principal concentrations are in the Fouta Toro an adjacent areas of Senegal, Mali and Gambia, in the Fouta Diallon area around Labe in Guinea, and in the Northern Region of Nigeria and adjacent parts of Niger and Cameroun. Smaller concentrations, primarily of cattle-herding Fulbe, occur all across the Savannah areas of West Africa.

The Fulbe are predominantly Muslim. In Nigeria they have a relatively recent history of poiltical hegemony over other tribes. Many important leaders in Guinea, Northern Region of Nigeria, and Federal Nigeria,are Fulbe.

The Fula language is divisible into dialects on various bases. The principal dialects accord with the main concentrations of speakers, being the Fouta Diallon dialect of Guinea, the Senegambian dialects known to the French as Peul, the Fula of Massina in Mali, and the Eastern Fula dialects known generally as Fulani in Northern Nigeria, of which the speech of Adamawa is the best known.