All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $860 for Spanish Volumes I, II, III, and IV, and that they no longer have available the textbooks for Volume I and II. We sell all Volumes with their respective textbooks for $19.95!

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

Speaking Spanish 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 Spanish Basic Course, as you can see, sells for $860 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, and they no longer have available the textbooks for Volume I and Volume II. We purchased the material from NTIS, as evidenced by the screenshot provided of the original Spanish 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 only 2% 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 Spanish Language Course

FSI Spanish Language Course contains 44 hours of audio, and four textbooks in PDF file format with 2,372 pages.

The materials in this book have been developed to present Spanish as a spoken language, and the skills of understanding and speaking Spanish are accordingly emphasized. The method of presentation will likely be new to students acquainted with more traditional methods of language teaching. In order to understand the materials, one must first understand the-method upon which they are built.

The method is known as GUlDED IMITATION. Its goal is to teach one to speak easily, fluently, with very little accent, and to do this without conscious effort, just as one speaks his own language without conscious effort.

There are two very important aspects of this method. First, learning a relatively small body of material so well that it requlres very little effort to produce it. This is OVER LEARNING. If a student overleans every dialog and drill as he goes through these books, they will almost certainly experience rapid progress in learning the Spanish language.

The second aspect is learning to authentically manipulate the sounds, sequences, and patterns of the language. The important implication here is the reality of both the model and the imitation. The model (teacher, recording, etc.) must provide Spanish as people really speak it in actual conversations, and the student must be helped to an accurate imitation. Above all, the normal tempo of pronunciation must be the standard; slowing down is, in this context, distortion.

The complete Spanish course consists of sixty units, each unit requires ten hours of study to master. The course is a six-hundred-hour course which may be studied intensively over a period of about six months; or may be spread at the rate of a unit a week over a period-of sixty weeks

The acquisition of a good Spanish pronunciation is first of all the result of careful listening and imitation plus whatever help can be obtained from initial pronunciation drills and description, and from the cues provided for continuing reference by the aids to listening. It is well to remember that a sizeable investment in pronunciation practice early in the course will pay handsome dividends later; correct pronunciation safely relegated to habit leaves one's full attention available for other problems of learning the language.

Every unit (after the first two) is organized in the same way: part one is the Spanish basic dialog with a few pertinent notes; part two is Spanish grammar drills and discussion; part three is a set of recombination narratives and 'dialogues; part four, beginning in Unit. 16, is Spanish readings.

Spanish Repetition Drills

The basic Spanish dialogs are the core of each unit. These Spanish dialogs are recreations of the real situations a student is most likely to encounter, and the vocabulary and sentences are those he is most likely to need. The dialogs are set in a mythical country called Surlandia, which is described as a typical Latin American republic, insofar as. it is possible to extract conunon features from so diverse an area. To further provide information in context, many of the notes suggest regional differences in both the Spanish language and the culture that will be encountered in various areas of Latin America and in Spain.

In the first part of the book new vocabularly is introduced mainly in the basic dialogs. Occasionally, in the illustrations of grammar points, new words are introduced in order to fill out patterns needed to do the exercises. New words are always clearly indicated by placing them on a line themselves, indented between the line's that are complete sentences. Since each new word is introduced in this fashion only once, the student should take pains to be sure he learns each word as it is presented. Careful pains have been taken to see that each word introduced will reappear many times later in the course, to help the student asslmilate each word in a variety of contexts.

The student should very carefully learn both the literal meanings of each individual word or phrase that is given on an indented line and the meaning that appears in the full sentences. It should not be cause for concern if the meaning in context is strikingly different from the literal meaning. In the construction of each dialog, the Spanish was written first, and the corresponding English is its closest equivalent and not a literal translation. It is therefore not at all surprising if the'Spanish does not seem to 'follow' the English.

The student should learn the basic Spanish dialogs by heart. If they are committed perfectly to rote memory, the Spanish drills will go easily and rapidly. Roughly half of the estimated ten hours that are spent in class on each unit should normally be devoted to the Spanish basic dialogs.

Each unit can in some way be likened to a musical theme with variations. The basic dialogs are the theme, and the drills provide the variations. Patterns of the structure of the Spanish language which have been learned in the basic sentences are expanded and manipulated in the drills.

There are four kinds of Spanish drills in each unit. Of these, two are designed to systematically vary selected basic sentences within the structure and vocabulary the student has already learned. And two are oriented toward the structure of the Spanish language to provide a systematic coverage of all important patterns.

Pattern drills are presented in a format which provides both practice and explanation. First appears a presentation of the pattern to be drilled, then various kinds of drills, and finally a more detailed discussion of the pattern.

The presentation consists of a listing of basic sentences which illustrate the Spanish grammar point to be drilled. Then there is an extrapolation which shows the relationships involved in the pattern in a two-dimensional chart, which is further explained by a short note or two. This presentation should provide sufficient clues to enable the student to understand and use the pattern correctly in the drills that follow.

These Spanish drills are mainly exercises making substitutions, responses, and translations, highlighting the Spanish grammar points covered.

After the Spanish drills there is a more detailed discussion of the pattern drilled. These descriptions are written in a condensed and somewhat technical fashion. While an effort was made to keep these discussions clear and readable, it has to be recognized that a description of the Spanish language is a technical subject, and simplifications can only be attained by sacrificing accuracy or at a cost of a great many more words than space allows. The student who works through these discussions by a careful reading will find that he is acquiring a set of analytical tools that will be useful throughtout the remainder of their career of interest in the Spanish language.

The Spanish student may notice slight differences in the respelling used in the aids to listening and in the grammar charts and discussions. The respelling useful as a guide toSpanish pronunciation for an English speaking student, records more details than a respelling to be used in grammar discussions where comparisons are made between Spanish forms, not between English and Spanish pronunciation.

The Spanish conversation section of each unit is designed to help bridge the gap between the more or less mechanical stimulus-response activity of the Spanish drills and the skill of free conversation which is the ultimate aim of the course. These recombination monologues and Spanish dialogs extend the abilities of the Spanish student into ever more natural situations.

Beginning with Spanish unit 16 reading materials are introduced for outside preparation with perhaps some classroom discussion of the questions provided. These readings can also be used to provide content information for oral summaries.

The Spanish readings are designed to provide information of interest and value about the culture which the Spanish language reflects and to provide insight into the practical problems an American is likely to encounter in adjusting to life in a Hispanic area.

Learn Spanish Pronunciation

The first two units are focused primarily on Spanish pronunciation problems. Spanish drills on other aspects of the Spanish language are deliberately postponed because of the importance of developing good pronunciation habits from the very beginning of the course. Spanish pronunciation is extremely important. It is the basis of all real fluency. A person is readily able to understand anything he can meaningfully say himself, if the correlation between the way he/she hears it and the way he/she says it is reasonably similar. Probably the more similar, the greater the ease of comprehension.

About the Spanish Language

Spanish, sometimes called Castilian, is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia during the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the later Medieval period.

Modern Spanish developed with the readjustment of consonants that began in 15th century. The Spanish language continues to adopt foreign words from a variety of other languages as well as developing new words. Spanish was taken most notably to the Americas as well as to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the 15th and 19th centuries, where it became the most important language for government and trade.

In 1999, there were 358 million people speaking Spanish as a native language and a total of 417 million Spanish speakers worldwide. Currently these figures are up to 400 and 500 million people respectively. Spanish is the second most natively spoken language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese.Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and used as an official language of the European Union, and Mercosur.

Due to its increasing presence in the demographics and popular culture of the United States, Spanish is widely considered to be the most beneficial second language for a native speaker of American English and is also highly regarded in the British Commonwealth, due to the Spanish language's immense geographic extent in Latin America and Europe for tourism and the growing popularity of warmer, more affordable, and culturally vibrant retirement destinations found in the Hispanic world. By 2050, 10 percent of the world population will be speaking Spanish