Welcome to fsi-language-courses.com, the home for language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute. These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain.
This site is dedicated to making these language courses freely available in an electronic format. It is an independent effort to foster the learning of worldwide languages.
[url=http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/TinaTilney/]Tina's Wiki Page[/url] | I can receive files by [url=http://www.pando.com/]pando.com[/url]
Kara http://kayray.org/
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"Mary wished to say something very sensible into her Zoom H2 Handy Recorder, but knew not how." -- Jane Austen (& Kara)
Oh that is way cool! I was going to ask you all which language I should study, but there's only one there that I was going to consider--Spanish. The others were Norwegian (my stepson has moved to Norway), Italian (my first love), and Arabic (so I can follow what's going on in the original).
Paula B
The Writing Show, where writing is always the story
http://www.writingshow.com
pberinstein wrote:Oh that is way cool! I was going to ask you all which language I should study, but there's only one there that I was going to consider--Spanish. The others were Norwegian (my stepson has moved to Norway), Italian (my first love), and Arabic (so I can follow what's going on in the original).
I'd been sort of hoping for Arabic too, but I'm also interested in Portuguese and German.
Friends: It is true that in these FSI courses we have found a huge resource for promoting foreign language skills.
It's also important to note, so that no one is surprised after investing time and energy into working with FSI materials, that they were produced during the US-USSR Cold War by the United States' State Department. Drills are multiple-choice substitution/responses derived from B.F. Skinner's behavioristic learning theory. Language dialogues, to be memorized, focus on preparing State Department officials on how to introduce US agricultural and industrial methods in underdeveloped countries.
I benefitted from exposure to these materials in an unusual context. In 1972, I enrolled in CIDOC, a Spanish language institute that used FSI books. CIDOC was founded by Ivan Illich, author of DeSchooling Society. CIDOC made productive use of revenue generated by its FSI-based language courses to provide a venue for progressive educational thinkers like Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. That was why I was there, and I have no regrets.
My point: these are well-structured materials, and savvy language learners can benefit from them, as I did. However, do not be surprised if the dialogues you are memorizing and studying, especially at the intermediate and advanced levels, are about selling more electrical appliances to pre-industrial societies in order to establish favorable trade relations with the United States.
So keep a weather eye out, if that is not your cup of tea, and learn the language structures while avoiding outdated ideologies.
-Denny
Last edited by DSayers on August 26th, 2006, 4:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
DSayers wrote: Language dialogues, to be memorized, focus on preparing State Department officials on how to introduce US agricultural and industrial methods in underdeveloped countries.
So keep a weather eye out, if that is not your cup of tea, and learn the language structures while avoiding outdated ideologies.
It's so true. I used a Cold-War course at school back in 1978 as an introduction to Russian. Some of the first vocabulary lessons included, as I recall, words like "absolutism", "marxism", "advance guard", and an inordinate amount of geography terms for a beginning language course.
But the good news is, no matter what sort of phrases are on offer with FSI courses, one gets a feel for the language, and an idea of what it sounds like in general. Not to mention that the prospective student could surprise native speakers with terms that a beginner would be unlikely to know. Heheheh.
Sandra
[color=purple]As usual, the grownup world made very little sense to me... (Manny Ellis,[i] Neighbourhood Tales[/i])[/color]
, (Or I was all year prior to going to Italy, anyway), do you use learnitalianpod.com?