All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $290 for Volume I, and they no longer offer Volume II. We sell Bulgarian Volume I and II, our price is $19.95!

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

Speaking Bulgarian 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 Bulgarian Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $290 from NTIS and that's just for Volume I, they no longer offer Volume II. 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 Bulgarian 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 7% 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 Bulgarian Basic Course

FSI Bulgarian Basic Course contains 18 hours of audio, and two textbooks in PDF file format with 954 pages.

Each unit of this course, aside from review units, is divided into three parts: Bulgarian Basic Sentences , Notes, Drills. Units 13 on have a fourth part, a reading passage. The Basic Bulgarian Sentences are normal dialogue material, meant to be memorized. The Bulgarian Notes explain the grammatical structure of the language and are divided roughly into three phases. The first phase (Units 1-5, 7-11) has a great deal of grammatical material per unit, in order to give the student a working knowledge of the most frequent patterns. The second phase (Units 13-17, 19-23) treats fewer grammatical features per unit. The third phase (Units 25-29) gives more overall treatments of selected features.

Bulgarian 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.

Bulgarian 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.

Speaking Bulgarian 1 - Getting Around; Greetings and General Phrases

Speaking Bulgarian 2 - Meeting People

Speaking Bulgarian 3 - Seeing the sights

Speaking Bulgarian 4 - What's your trade?

Speaking Bulgarian 5 - Let's talk About the weather

Speaking Bulgarian 6 - Review

Speaking Bulgarian 7 - Getting a Room

Speaking Bulgarian 8 - By Car

Speaking Bulgarian 9 - Dinner

Speaking Bulgarian 10 - Shopping

Speaking Bulgarian 11 - Letter Writing

Speaking Bulgarian 12 - Review

Speaking Bulgarian 13 - Stepping Out

Speaking Bulgarian 14 - Discussing the Play

Speaking Bulgarian 15 - The Post Office

Speaking Bulgarian 16 - The Market Place

Speaking Bulgarian 17 - Instructions to the Staff

Speaking Bulgarian 18 - Review

Speaking Bulgarian 19 - An Excursion

Speaking Bulgarian 20 - Visiting a doctor

Speaking Bulgarian 21 - On the phone

Speaking Bulgarian 22 - In the Country

Speaking Bulgarian 23 - Government

Speaking Bulgarian 24 - Review

Speaking Bulgarian 25 - Sports

Speaking Bulgarian 26 - About Bulgaria

Speaking Bulgarian 27 - Culture

Speaking Bulgarian 28 - Parade

Speaking Bulgarian 29 - Bulgarian History

Speaking Bulgarian 30 - Review

About the Bulgarian Language

Bulgarian is spoken by more than ten million people worldwid and is the official language of the Republic of Bulgaria. It is not a difficult language for English-speakers. In fact, of all the Slavonic languaes, Bulgarian's structure makes it one of the easiest for English speakers to learn. True, the Cyrillic alphabet of 30 letters, which takes its name from the ninth century scholar and holy man St. Cyril, may at first seem a bit of a barrier, but it is not difficult to master. The Cyrillic alphabet is very logical, extremely efficient and well adapted to rendering the sounds of Bulgarian.

Bulgarian is a member of the Slavic language subfamily, which is a branch of the large Indo-European family of languages. It bears close similiarities to the other Slavic tongues in both vocabulary and grammar, but its resemblance to Russian, Ukranian, Belorussian and Serbian is especially conspicous, since they all share a common alphabet, Cyrillic. It should be noted here that after the death of the creators of the Cyrillic alphabet, the brothers Cyril and Methodius, it was namely Bulgaria that their students developed and popularized the modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet which, with some slight differences, is used today.

Irrespective of all features classifying it as a Slavic language, Bulgarian has its own specific characteristics that differentiate it from the other members of this linguistic division and make it particularly interesting for the Slavic scholars. Undoubtedly, this interest is strengthened by the fact that modern Bulgarian is the direct heir to the classical for the Slavic world Old Church Slavonic language.

Unlike all other Slavic tongues, modern Bulgarian lacks the case-marking system, i.e. the grammatical function of a noun, a pronoun or an adjective is not indicated by changes of inflection. Instead, prepositions are used, just as in modern English. Also unlike all other Slavic languages, during its centuries-long historical development Bulgarian has acquired a new grammatical category - the definite article of nouns, appearing in the form of a suffix, added to the stem. At the same time, adjectives and adverbs form their comparatives and superlatives in an analytical manner, by means of word-particles.

Generally speaking, the Bulgarian language has evolved from synthetism towards analytism. Today, syntactic relationships are expressed by function words and changes of position rather than by inflected forms.