All our Vietnamese Basic Course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $180 for Volume II, and they no longer have Vietnamese I available at all. We sell both Vietnamese Basic Courses Volume I and II with both textbooks and 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.

Speak Vietnamese 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 Vietnamese Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $180 from NTIS, and they no longer have available Vietnamese Volume I. NTIS is 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 Vietnamese 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 Vietnamese Language Course

FSI Vietnamese Language Course contains 23 hours of audio, and two textbooks in PDF file format with 711 pages.

Each of the Vietnamese ten 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.

Vietnamese 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:

One short beep means - Listen

One long beep means - Repeat

wo short beeps means - Participate

Two long beeps means - Redo the same segment

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

Listening

Memorizing by repetition of break-downs and whole sentences

Developing fluency by additional repetition of whole sentences

Participating by assuming one role in the dialogue,

Confirming comprehension by re-listing.

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.

Learn Vietnamese Guide to Pronunciation

The purpose of the Vietnamese Guide to Pronunciation is to familiarize a student with the pronunciation of Southern Vietnamese to the point where he can recognize and reproduce with fluency all its commonly occurring sounds and sequences of sounds.

The method underlying the presentation involves listening, contrasting, recogninzing, and imitating. The material has been presented as simply as possible, always with the beginning student, rather than the professional linguist, in mind. While some technical phonetic descriptions are included for those who understand them, they can be ignored by the student with limited linguistic background.

This guide should be used in conjunction with the audio recordings. To try to learn Vietnamese pronunciation by reading the text without reference to the audio recordings would be useless as trying to learn to play the piano by reading music without ever touching a keyboard.

The guide should be used not only as an introduction to pronunciation but also for remedial purposes later. Students having pronunciation difficulties should review appropriate drills repeatedly until the difficulties are cleared up.

Speak Vietnamese 1 - Hello, how are you, where are you going, to the train station

Speak Vietnamese 2 - Directions to the hotel and street address

Speak Vietnamese 3 - Introducing your self, what is your name, when did you arrive?

Speak Vietnamese 4 - Banking and telling time

Speak Vietnamese 5 - What time is it? When are you arriving? Buying gasoline

Speak Vietnamese 6 - I'm hungry, do you want to go eat? Shop or goto a restaurant

Speak Vietnamese 7 - Going to a bookstore for a Vietnamese - English dictionary

Speak Vietnamese 8 - Where do I pay?

Speak Vietnamese 9 - Describing modes of transportation

Speak Vietnamese 10 - Asking directions to the market

Speak Vietnamese 11 - Time words, Counting people, going to and from the airport

Speak Vietnamese 12 - Ordering food

Speak Vietnamese 13 - Introductions with people

Speak Vietnamese 14 - Asking about family

Speak Vietnamese 15 - Making hotel reservations

About the Vietnamese Language

To Speak Vietnamese, you need to pay attention to the variations in pronunciation and tone as this can drastically affect a word's meaning.

If you master Vietnamese tones, you will have few problems Speaking Vietnamese. You will find that Vietnamese grammar is quite simple.

Vietnam's population is about 80 million. The main religious beliefs in Vienam are about 80% Buddhist and 10% Catholic. The remaining 10% are predominantly Taoist, Christian and Muslim.

The Vietnamese language is a unique language as it has no dialects. Everyone can understand each other, althought there are three distinguishable major accents: Northern, Central and Southern.

To speak Vietnamese and to be understood correctly, you need to become familiar with how consonants, vowels, diphthongs and trophthongs are pronounced.

Vietnamese is a tonal language and is written in Roman script. Words never change their form, nouns have no masculine/feminine or plural forms, and verbs have only one form regardless of gender, person or tense. To understand how the Vietnamese language works and to succesfully use and speak Vietnamese, an understanding of grammar is vital.