I just started the Spanish FSI course! I can't wait to start talking like a 1960s radio announcer!!

How come i didn't hear a single thing about those courses before i saw this video? I can't even thank you enough for this

Thank you for this insightful intro to FSI. I started learning Japanese way back in SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies, a meta-faculty of the University of London). We began, after learning hiragana and katakana, and dove right into "Beginning Japanese", a Yale University course based on books and audio cassettes. It was very very heavy on repetition and drills, hour after boring hour of them. The professors really didn't care for this approach, preferring grammar books and vocabulary lists, but by God it worked and I was soon producing grammatically correct responses with NO conscious effort. I ended up my efforts by becoming a professional translator. Moral: boring is sometimes a necessary part of language learning.

I used the FSI Swedish course, and I thought it was great. It got boring after a while, and I did exactly as you said - counting how many minutes were left on the track, but, it worked. I think FSI and Assimil are the best courses available, even though their methodologies are completely different. I supplemented it with reading Harry Potter in Swedish along with the audiobook, and eventually it sank in.

The basic french and Spanish courses are great on their own to be used as a reader. Once you know enough about how to read the languages and pronounce the words, these resources as just readers are absolutely unparalleled. Absolutely amazing for people who want to work on instant reflex in speaking either of these languages.

I went through the FSI advanced German course and found it to be extremely effective. It was tough going and the material was a little antiquated but well worth the effort. One thing I liked was the huge number of examples illustrating complex grammatical concepts.

I am working through the Greek FSI course, and I'm finding it really useful. I've previously spent some time with DuoLingo, and I also started with Assimil, but I feel like I'm progressing much more quickly with the FSI course than with either DuoLingo or Assimil. The course is really dense, and that's a good thing, especially since it's free! The beginner course has 25 units, and each unit comes with ~30 min of audio, but it takes me 1-2 hours to get through each unit, spread out over a few days. I spend about a week total on each unit, repeating the exercises until it becomes ingrained. Greek pronunciation is relatively straightforward, so the quality of the audio isn't an issue - the course (so far) has 2 different speakers, one who speaks really quickly, so it trains your ear to listen to native Greek. The course does a good job of explaining the grammar, and I have a better understanding of how the grammar works now than with the other methods I've used and is better in some areas than my grammar books. The only downside of the FSI course is that some of the vocabulary (and some of the grammatical constructions) appear to be dated. So you just have to keep that in mind when you're going through the course. But it's FREE!

I am studying Russian and recently took a look at the FSI courses and I found their phonology introduction very helpful and thorough. I had a much better understanding of hard and soft consonants. In other resources I've used they were glossed over completely which made my pronunciation imprecise. I did get the impression that I need to supplement pronunciation from better recordings. Thanks for your advice about the sentence drills; I think I will continue to use the course for that purpose as the language is much more difficult than anything I've ever encountered as an English speaker who only ever had Spanish in school, and at this point I can still hardly make sentences, so that will be helpful. I love this channel and have been watching every single video. Very informative, I hope you continue to put out great content and feature new languages!

This is cool! I don't care if it's boring, because my love for languages will keep me motivated! Plus I can take small breaks! 😁

On the subject of book-based language learning courses, I am currently learning Latin through the Cambridge Latin Course series of books at school. I noticed a major problem you had with the FSI courses for languages was that they were boring. One would also assume a Latin course in which almost all of the learning is done through translation of texts would also be boring. However, the Cambridge Latin Course combats that really effectively. They have an amazing story going through the series, which makes you feel for the characters, and such. This stops it from getting boring as there is always a motivation to finish the story and find out what happens next, if a certain character will survive or not, et cetera (no pun intended). In fact, a friend of mine who is not continuing with Latin asked to be kept updated with the story, it was so engaging. I can't recommend their series enough to people interested in learning Latin. Though I don't really know how large that number would be. :)

I've used the Spanish and Italian courses and both improved my pronunciation beyond all expectation because they do one thing I have never seen in another course -- they tell you what mouth shape to use for each of the difficult sounds. They describe the position of the teeth, tongue and lips and how to move them, which makes a huge difference for adults learning a language. I'd say if you get bored with the courses, just pay attention to the pronunciation parts of the courses. (gotta say that I don't know if each FSI course has the same method of teaching pronunciation as Sp and It, but what the heck, they are free, so check out the one you want for your particular language).

Love your channel man, I really truly appreciate all the hard work and dedication you put into this channel, and I'm super happy that you've racked up a really impressive amount of subscribers for this type of channel (language/linguistics based) since most channels on this topic don't usually get so many. Just means your hard work has paid off! Anyway have a good one man, et merci beaucoup!

Before this video, I didn't even know that these courses existed. Thank you so much!

This is a gold mine for me! Thank you so much. I love drills because I love accuracy.

Man, I just downloaded the textbook for Czech, since I am learning it in a serious way. Thank you very much for this link, it's old, but amazing! Thank you very much again!

I never found those FSI courses boring, because the oral drills are rhythmic, and it's easy to go off into "the zone", just if you were chanting. They are good for use while walking around or otherwise occupying your hands or legs while your mouth works with the course. Some of the recordings are unclear, but at some of the sites where they're available for free download, people have digitally cleaned up the tape hiss, so while they're not as good as a new digital recording, they're better than they were in their original state.

Obrigado Paul!! Você me ajudou muito, eu estava procurando materiais gratuitos em grego😍😍 Parabéns pelos vídeos.🇧🇷🇧🇷

Hey Paul I want to thank you for your channel. I Speak English and I am trying to learn polish but it learning polish feels like you are putting your brain in a blender! But with your videos I am able to get help and find ways to improve my polish so thank you :)! Do widzenia!

I began using the FSI Turkish course, but after asking some native speakers to take a look at it, they all pointed out that a fair amount of the vocabulary was noticeably dated (also true of an older edition of Teach Yourself Turkish). I think even some of the pronunciation must have changed noticeably in the five decades between when it was produced and when I began using it, as I was told that the Turkish in the recordings sounded like it came from an old movie, and they weren't referring to the audio quality. Perhaps older diplomatic language use was meant to be stiff and formal. I really liked all the drills though, which are rare these days. I ended up switching to other materials, and as you pointed out, it's free, so you're not losing any money if it's not for you.

Great post Paul! I went through and passed the DLI (Defense Language Institute) Russian course in the 80s. The FSI and DLI use the same format. Yes, those old school methods are completely effetive for getting to a CEFL B2 or DLI/FSI 2+/2+ but take A LOT of personal dedication if learning it on your own. You had me laughing about how boring it is and wishing the modules would be over! I remember pounding my head on the desk in agony during those recordings. A trick I learned from a friend is to NOT try to complete each module of drills or dialogue straight through. As soon as you feel bored or frustrated, STOP, stretch, do push ups, get some air, ANYTHING that works for you to reset your mind, then go back to it fresh. Some of the more boring or difficult stuff may require a reset every 2-5 minutes. Break those lessons up into bite sized snacks for your brain. Your brain will thank you for breaks and absorb the new information.

Thanks so much for this! I only just heard about this website, and your explanation was very clear. I'm going to go check it out for Portuguese :). I like drills, so hopefully it'll be handy!

It even has a material there for my mother tongue, Tausug. Wow. I'll try these out! Thank you for sharing!

thanks for that video Paul. i will use the FSI as a material to master and learn new languages. your channel is amazing

These courses are excellent and very thorough! Very cool that they're free.

Thank you, Paul! You're awesome!

I'm glad that someone has done a review of this website, I'd found it a while ago and thought it was an absolute gem, because of the variety of languages available and that it was free and had audio recordings. I'm looking to learn a language on there (potentially Uzbek or Georgian) but I was wondering if anyone knew how good they were or other courses were

Thank you so much for making a video about this. I am going to try it out now.

Thanks much for the FSI link. Surprisingly, they didn't seem to have much in the way of Dutch or Swedish - "my" languages of course - except for a very old and very musty DLI course. The Peace Corps course in Russian looked promising, though, and the Peace Corps section lists quite a few less-famous languages. Overall a very valuable resource for language students. Thanks again.

Thanks! This is going to be very useful.

Very useful and cool channel! Thanks for the link!!!!

wow thanks for this info! definitely helpful for learning languages

Great stuff. Thank you, sir

This is genuinely helpful for me bc I really need ways to drill myself and improve my fluency in Indonesian and other future languages I will be learning.

So many FSI languages courses it's very tempting not downloading them all :) but for now i have to focus only on german :)

Great to see someone who is open to such an unfashionable approach. The FSI gets impressive and reliable results, so I'm sure that drilling has its place for many learners as part of a balanced study routine provided you can find the motivation. And at the very least the FSI courses can serve as a model for how to create your own well-designed drills to focus on any problems you identify, even if you don't use them directly because of poor recording quality for your target language. There's so little audiolingual material around these days that it's hard to find examples of best practice. I make drills with a free account in Quizlet, where it works quite well. The built-in digital voices are probably at least as good as the old FSI recordings (and FAR better than Michel Thomas), provided you're not using them as your source for pronunciation practice!

paul--You do a great job. I have evaluated language learning materials myself: even the FSI course, and I agree with you. Two side notes: my father was a diplomat but he couldn't put two words together in another language. My mother was talented, and could speak French and Spanish until the end. So, a great deal depends on your own natural abilities. Second, I grew up speaking English, French and Spanish and at age 81 still keep them up. Overall, my best advice I can give is to go to the country and learn on the ground. Nothing stimulates language learning like being hungry!

Thanks for the link 😄

I just completed the FSI Basic Spanish Course Level 2. I really enjoyed doing the audio course because the course touched on some interesting grammar concepts and the audio is very "native" sounding.

This is exactly what I’ve been looking for a long time. I really appreciate the review for this. I’ve been trying to improve my French for about 15 years to better communicate with my Mom’s family in France but I get stuck with fluency/automaticity. We’ll see how motivated I am now I guess haha. Thanks for sharing all of your insight and videos! It’s a pleasure to watch them.

I learned German in 2001 for a trip & had many conversations with Germans & it's spoken by many Europeans. These courses work!

Great you give a very relevant information .

I will need to check this out for my studies of French and further languages (I would like to learn Spanish and Italian as well as German later). Thanks a bunch! It may be boring and the low-quality sound will bother me (I will be hunting down better quality audio for sure), but I've tried other free courses or cheaper in-person options and the one thing that drives me crazy is that in some beginner-level free (or cheap) studies, the topics don't go in any logical order and the words they expect you to memorize are often pointless for a beginner. I took formal Italian studies for a year and am re-acquainting myself with French after not learning it since high school and I need a classroom-like experience where you learn sentence structure and basic, logical grammar and terminology (ie: introduce yourself, ask directions) and move from there in a logical, systematic manner. Otherwise, I feel like I am definitely missing things. I will check out your link for sure!

Thanks, Paul. I'm starting on FSI Spanish,. I'm a boomer and it reminds me of the Audio-Lingual language labs of the 60s. Bored me out of my mind. But now, being older and wiser and perhaps a bit more patient, I appreciate the "pros" you highlighted-- automaticity. Duolingo is great, yet I find myself tounge-tied even though I've allegedly mastered the material. I now... well, not "enjoy"...but do appreciate what the FSI course has to offer. And SO much material and all for FREE. If you bring your own motivation, it really is a valuable resource. PS: One question, can you get the books preprinted instead of just PDF? You show Barron's books in your video, are these the same as the PDFs of the courses?

Thank you Paul.

thanks a lot for this information.

I think the FSI courses, at least some of them, also can be really helpful for pronunciation, especially the "programmatic" courses that are available online for free along with the basic courses. These programmatic courses focus on pronunciation. I found the German one to be really helpful. Also, the Basic Spanish course spends a great deal of time on pronunciation in the early lessons. My best friend is a native Spanish speaker and tells me that I have excellent pronunciation--I got that from FSI. But yes, they are truly boring, and if you don't motivate yourself you won't get far.

This is a very nice resource to be aware of. One thing that makes a resource a little bit interesting is the datedness of it. As an example, Korean is one of my languages of interest. Because I rarely have time to pursue my hobby while sitting down at a desk but rather must use available time when I am exercising or driving to learn or maintain language skills and abilities, I only find the audio part of the course useful. This is no problem for me with Korean, since I’ve studied it extensively and am listening to Korean for the most part without a transcript or notes. The interesting thing though is that the course that I am listening to was apparently dictated almost 60 years ago. Korea was a vastly different country back then. Since then, the culture and the language have changed. The course is free and yes useful, but it would be funny if I didn’t already know enough Korean to recognize some of the phrases that might seem out of place today. If the course was my main tool for a Learning Korean, and I went to Korea using what I had learned, I might seem like someone who had stepped out of a time capsule. So it is kind of unique listening to the dialogs and everything keeping this in mind. Of course when one is learning languages, there is never just one thing that one should use but a great variety of things in moving towards proficiency and fluency. So I doubt anyone would have a problem using this as part of their strategy. Thanks so much for posting this information!

¡Americanos ♫ os recibimos con alegría! ♫ Thank you for FSI resources.

thanks for the link. I"ve taken classes in high school, now years later, I do want to take a 2nd crack at it.

really cool, thanks for the tip. The hungarian one is insanely good

One thing I would add is that FSI courses for languages that deviate from the Latin alphabet (e.g., Korean, Japanese, etc.) are kind of useless. They ignore the syllabaries and go phonetic in the Latin alphabet, which any teacher of these languages will tell you is a big no-no.

Unbelievable, I start watching this video and got a mail from them with the title "Hi Victor, how is the FSI course?," I downloaded something like 2 years ago. This mail was for a blog last updated on July 9, 2020. :O

This is great!!!

these could be useful for brushing up my spoken fluency in languages i studied in high school and college. reading practice is easy to find; spoken practice (esp. cheap or free spoken practice) is a bit harder to manage in a small town. hurrah for the internet!

The FSI material is really thorough

Thanks. That's a nice summary of the FSI language materials. I guess many books, tapes, courses, are based on these materials. All of those are NOT necessary. The FSI course in the given language will give you a great start. You don't hear about FSI from commercial sellers as they're out to make a buck. And as you note correctly, all the FSI books, tapes are in the public domain. There really is only ONE con - and that probably gets 90% of users, potential users. For sure, you need DISCIPLINE. Got to sit down and put in the work. Most people (including me often) just can't/won't ..... But DO the work, and you WILL learn more from the FSI material than anywhere else. And as you note, it's FREE. Only step after FSI is go to the country, stay away from other Americans and start listening/speaking with the people.

I just started the Spanish Basic Course. My mouth hurts from all the pronunciation drills. Some of them are really difficult -- like tongue twisters.

I mean, they're free.

Thanks for the link! I'm gonna try the FSI German course during my summer break. I learned English through endless drills in school so I am quite used to the process.

I printed the pdf for the whole Hungarian course. There's a lot of pages, however most printers will have a function to print two pages on a side. I also print on both sides of the paper which my laser printer does automatically. Only discovered that by accident when I was printing it! The drills are great because you can use any willing person whether they speak the language or not.

thanks for the info

If you want to get the classroom interaction, you can look for a hardcopy edition with an instructor included. There are a fair number of unpopular instructors that actually are free, but unfortunately it increases the shipping costs A LOT because instructors weigh much more than books.

Thank you!!!

The French phonology is really good if you are a beginner starting out not understanding the rules of French pronunciation and speaking

Thank you

Well, I like the FSI courses. German and Polish courses worked well, but the Russian course I did not like it. As I like to grammar and exercises to fix the concepts and sentence structures, these courses are great. I just find your channel. Really quite different from what I've seen around. I've already watched your videos and we see language studing quite similarly. I saw that you are interested in Eastern languages. My interest are the Slavic languages, especially Russian and Polish. Keep going! Really interesting videos!

Thanks for this bruh.

The music stopped at 5:52 and it was such a relief... it didn't last long

I have only skimmed some of the materials but at a glance it looks pretty damn effective and I will probably use it in the future. It has loads of audio almost entirely in the target language with the individual words spoken in isolation and also complete phrases at full speed. That is ideal, imo. Unlike Pimsleur (which I think is generally pretty good) you can read along and have the English text as well if you need it, but no English intruding on the audio. (I will say though that I think the German and French courses start out too challenging for a rank beginner). Yeah, it might be a bit dry. But for me the most motivating thing is GETTING RESULTS. I’ve never understood people who say they “like” their language program because it’s “fun” or some such.

Hi Paul, Would FSI be a good program to learn the basics of conversation? And would eventually (when you are able to make basic sentences) combining it with for example italki make someone fluent if they would practice enough? I'm a Dutch native myself and want to pick up German. I have had German classes in school, was never really interested and failed but at least it's not completely unfamiliar to me (on top of that the languages are pretty similar). My question: Would I be able to learn German this way if I put in the time? Thanks in advance.

3:44 ‐ When I'm doing these lessons and I have 10 minutes left, this part of the video pops into my mind.

This was interesting and I'm surprised I did not know about it, I think I might try the Hebrew one to help my learning.

Hey Paul, thanks for your videos. I just ran across your channel recently and love your attitude. I'd be grateful for your feedback - I checked out the FSI site and I have the hardest time finding a European Portuguese course. Would the pragmatic course be considered for the European style? I live in Lisbon and really can't afford the expensive courses I've found here. Thanks in advance 👍

The french fsi course is excellent. I don't bother with the old audio since it takes too long. I literally just read the thousands of french sentences aloud and I can see how I'm sort of programming my brain to know the sentence structures.

They are great, and excellent.I recommend of this collection(FSI): ,Amharic ,Arabic Arabia Saudi ,Swedish ,Hungarian ,Finnish ,Hebrew and German.

In my opinion the ultimate language learning tools would be pimsleur+rosetta stone+memrise+anki+FSI language course in target language

Agreed with the assessment. I downloaded the Korean course. I've got a few other courses, so I didn't really need it. What I found interesting, it shows how Korean looks when written with a typewriter. The other downside is the volume of audio files - there's a lot of repetitiveness. The guy really sounds like a soldier but the woman's voice is OK. Yes, they are not the best quality. I will get back to it every now and again. It is good to use as an additional material.

You rule, Paul.

Any recommendation on a similar style course for English? My parents speak Spanish, and want to learn English. I've tried teaching them one on one, but I think a course would help them learn on their own.

Finally something designed to be used for 4-6 hours a day, even though you might find these boring, try to use any language learning app for 4-6 hours everyday and you'll see how much better these courses are.. of course not everyone has the time, so apps are not completely useless

thank you so much. I found some courses of tagalog

Hi Paul, where did you get those books from mate? I have been trying to find an FSI book on Russian but can’t seem to find it any where. All you find is online downloadable material.

I knew about the fsi swedish material that is used in sweden. As a non native -but fluent- swedish speaker I have heard of it. But I didn't know that fsi material existed in other languages as well. I am pretty interested if there is material in greek too. My mother language! ☺

What do you think of the TV5 MONDE French web-based free course? I am finishing the A1 level but I'd really appreciate your opinion.

Thank you for this information! Until recently I had been following another polyglot instructor. No matter how often I asked, he would not provide free or cheap resources. I think he wanted all of his followers to hire him as a coach. I stopped following him because after getting through a year of videos, I found he had little to say. Everything was a repeat of a previous video.

Awesome

Completely agree with everything you say there. Can I put in a good word for the Finnish course? I had already ploughed through quite a few Finnish courses and got to a point where I could read fairly well but speaking was something that I still struggled with. The FSI Finnish course is where I felt I actually began to speak it and it is basically what you said. It's the rigorous drills and repetition and the sheer quantity of material that did it but by the end of it I actually had the confidence to speak in Finnish when I next went. A bit like your Israeli experience. Having looked through most of them online I have to say the Finnish is probably the most well written, by the way. I also did the Serbo-Croatian course. It's a lot more old fashioned than the Finnish. The recording is painful. It sounds as though the speaker believed you had to shout to be picked up by the mic. Which may have been true at the time! My Bosnian wife was on hand to help sort out dialectal differences. It's actually basically a Serbian course and (oversimplifying it a bit) Bosnians use 'mostly' Serbian vocabulary pronounced in a 'Croatian' way. Nevertheless, the lack of materials beyond the beginner level (constant problem for linguists) and the sheer quantity of exercises etc meant I did really make progress. My current project is Romanian and although FSI only do a Romanian grammar book I've just downloaded the DLI Romanian course from www.livelingua.com/#project which looks more or less the same deal as FSI. I'll see how I get on.

I learned Russian as a teenager by means of drilling exercises. True, it's boring but you learn it. Russian is a very hard language, the grammar is a nightmare with its complex declention cases, noun irregular stresses, its countless irregular verbs. Yes, my Russian is fluent due to the boring drilling exercises. Today they use different approaches, but my Russian is still much better than most of those younger students who don't want to get bored. Thank you kindly, Paul.

Peace Corps also has more recent language training materials for free. Spoiler alert, the Chinese one is really intro level.

I'm studying Korean using FSI course, and it is boring 😅 But i find that the drills are really helpful!!!! Thanks for this video!

Would LangFocus consider reviewing Influent? I do not think its good but I would not mind seeing him review it.

The modern standard Arabic drills were very useful.

do you have any tips on how to work through the French manual if any? it doesn't really give instructions

I saw you talking about FSI categories in another video (german). Do you have any material explaining how does it work? could you make that?

Are you recording this in a 1980`s amusement arcade?

Paul... Love the channel. Keep up to good work. Question about FSI portugues... Is it European or Brazilian? This is the portugues programmatic course I'm referring to. Have only gone through unit one, but the pronunciation of a couple words makes me think it's Brazilian.. D-I-a is "gee-yah", not "Dee-yah". Likewise, the "sh" seems to be absent as well.. "Estes" vs "ess-tash". Thanks for any info you (or another reader) can provide.

is it good for beginners who can take a beating? I wanna learn Korean and Japanese as 4th and 5th language, after Dutch (native), English (fluent) and German (on duolingo), but duolingo doesn't have those and all apps I know don't go beyond teaching the characters and words. Google Play is void of ways to learn grammatics and lessons or study books are too expensive. I cannot afford it. also, how up to date is it? I know Korea westernized a lot after the war, and as a young person, I want to understand other young people

wow i just listened to the first tape of the spanish one, it sounds recorded with a string and soup can. I had to give up before it was even finished, with that much vocabulary and it being so unclear i was getting a headache.

Hey! I'm sure someone somewhere has asked you this already, but what's your thoughts on babble? I started French on it, seems good so far. Cheers!

What do you think about language transfer paul?