FSI Language Courses

Shortly after WWII, the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department produced language courses for its employees serving on overseas assignments. These language courses were designed for complete beginners and included many hours of audio, as well as several repetition and response drills. The focus was on listening and speaking, and less so on reading and writing. The FSI language courses are in the public domain and therefore have no copyright protection. Many of the courses are available to download for free and they were donated by generous people who spent many, many hours digitizing the course books and cassettes into PDF and MP3 formats. Since HTML versions do not yet exist, I am trying to convert the PDFs into webpages that integrate the sound files, but it's a very time-consuming project. I would also like to make EPUB versions for more portability.

Available lessons:

• From Spanish to Portuguese - complete (except currently missing audio for the final pronunciation exercises, i.e. tape 4)
• Italian FAST (Familiarization and Short-Term Training) - 10 lessons (2 of which include audio flash cards and exercises)
• German Basic Course - 4 lessons
• Swedish Basic Course - 2 lessons
• French Basic Course - 2 lessons

I would like to add the Headstart Spanish and Portuguese next, as well as other courses eventually. I will also add notes where appropriate if the language has changed, i.e. if a certain word is no longer used. For faster downloads of the mp3 files, try using the DownThemAll add-on with Firefox on the Contents pages. You can download the mp3s through my site or through the yojik or antibozo sites. Right-click on the file and choose Save As... to save the mp3 to your hard drive. Please note that I am copying the text from PDF files, so there may be some spelling mistakes that I have missed in the OCR process. I'm trying to proofread as much as I can, but if you spot a mistake, please let me know so that I can fix it. I welcome any and all help with this project!

A few others have begun converting some FSI courses to online versions or other formats (such as epub):

• Russian Course
• German Basic Course
• Basic Hungarian: Introduction & Unit 1
• Finnish Graded Reader: Introduction & Unit 1

And some of the lessons of the second volume of the German Basic Course are available on Youtube, thanks to mithridates:

• Unit 13
• Unit 14 (part 1)
• Unit 14 (part 2)