All our Swedish course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $250, our price is $19.95!

 

 

 

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

 

Learn Swedish 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 Swedish Basic 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 Swedish 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 less than 8% 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 Swedish Basic Course

The first twelve units consist of dialogs which cover a range of situations relevant to your life and work in Sweden. The last few units are written in a narrative form and constitute a transition to further reading.

Each unit includes "Notes on Basic Sentences," which clarify certain Swedish grammar points, cultural information and idiomatic expressions that we think are particularly important.

Grammatical explanation should be thought of only as a tool when learning the Swedish language. But it is the key to understanding a structure and a system which might otherwise seem confusing. Even though Swedish grammar and Swedish vocabulary are related to their English counterparts, a word-by-word translation from either language into the other does not neoessarily produce good sense. Because of important differences in ways we have of expressing the same thoughts~ speakers of English and Swedish see each other as using different patterns of language. It is therefore invaluable to learn Swedish patterns to the point where they become a real part of your speech, so that the difference between English and Swedish becomes natural to you.

Swedish Drills are recorded first for listening, then for familiarization through repetition, and finally for participation. During the participation step, when the Swedish student performs the required manipulation, his utterances are confirmed on the audio immediately following the space provided for his participation.

Swedish Drills are generally in two groups in any unit: a) variation drills on pattern sentences, which provide opportunities for the Swedish student to develop flexibility in the use of patterns already memorized, and b) grammar drills, which are intended to provide practice for the Swedish student in the operation of the patterns explained in the immediately preceding grammar notes.

Learn Swedish 1 - Greetings

Learn Swedish 2 - An American arrives at Arlanda, Stockholm's international airoport and is met

Learn Swedish 3 - Meeting an old friend

Learn Swedish 4 - Going sightseeing, going to the station, and to the bank to change money

Learn Swedish 5 - Renting an apartment

Learn Swedish 6 - Comprehension quiz

Learn Swedish 7 - Arriving at the office

Learn Swedish 8 - Shopping at a department store

Learn Swedish 9 - Having lunch

Learn Swedish 10 - Discussing plans for the evening

Learn Swedish 11 - Two friends having a conversation

Learn Swedish 12 - Introduction to Swedish social etiquette

Learn Swedish 13 - Recognizing new words

Learn Swedish 14 - Dialog

Learn Swedish 15 - Dialog continued

Learn Swedish 16 - Emphasis on reading text

About the Swedish Language

Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Aland islands.Swedish is mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to a lesser extent with Danish. Along with the other North Germanic languages, Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. Swedish is currently the largest of the North Germanic languages by numbers of speakers.

Standard Swedish, used by most Swedish people, is the national language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was well established by the beginning of the 20th century. While distinct regional varieties descended from the older rural dialects still exist, the spoken and written language is uniform and standardized. Some Swedish dialects differ considerably from the standard language in grammar and vocabulary and are not always mutually intelligible with Standard Swedish. These Swedish dialects are confined to rural areas and are spoken primarily by small numbers of people with low social mobility. Though not facing imminent extinction, such dialects have been in decline during the past century, despite the fact that they are well researched and their use is often encouraged by local Swedish authorities.