Which basic courses have the best quality audio ?

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Which basic courses have the best quality audio ?

Postby DaraghM on November 26th, 2009, 10:44 am

Having used only three FSI courses so far, I'm wondering which FSI Basic courses have very good quality audio, and which ones are very poorly recorded.

My ratings are as follows,

FSI Hungarian Basic : Excellent
FSI Bulgarian Basic: Excellent
FSI French Basic: Average but occasionally very poor.
FSI Spanish Basic: Average but also occasionally very muffled.

How would you rate the others ?

[Updated to include Bulgarian]
Last edited by DaraghM on December 16th, 2009, 10:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Which basic courses have the best quality audio ?

Postby James on November 26th, 2009, 5:58 pm

I haven't made it all the way through the Chinese course, but from what I can tell, it's a mixed bag. Some of the recordings (especially in the early part of the course) are pretty bad. Still, usable, but not especially pleasant. But the later modules seem quite good.

-James
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Re: Which basic courses have the best quality audio ?

Postby daristani on November 27th, 2009, 11:03 am

I think it's important to remember that the various FSI courses were created at different times, with corresponding differences in the technology available to make the original audio materials. In addition to these differences, the materials on this site were donated by a number of different people working voluntarily with materials they had obtained from official USG sources, in some cases on cassettes and in some cases on CDs. These people have different levels of technical skill, different software for editing, etc., and so there are bound to be further differences in the end results.

And not all the materials for a given language came from the same person. I loaned the tapes and book for the second volume of German, as well as a few missing cassette tapes for volume I of the French course. I also recall providing one of the books (only) for the Serbo-Croatian course, since the previous one on the (original) site had some pages that were hard to read. In the case of the massive Mandarin Chinese course, for instance, I recall that several different people, working over a period of a couple of years, individually contributed various modules of the course, so it's only natural that there should be substantial variation in the results. So it's conceivable that you could get better audio quality by purchasing directly from the government, or from re-sellers like Audio-Forum and the like. It's also possible that, at least in some cases, what's available here is of better quality, depending on how much work has been done to improve the sound.

Personally, I'm just glad these materials are available, and I'm grateful to all those who've contributed materials, which in some cases cost them substantial sums of money, for us to use freely, and I encourage anyone else out there who's got materials that aren't on the site to make them available.
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Re: Which basic courses have the best quality audio ?

Postby James on November 28th, 2009, 10:06 am

Just for the record, I meant no disrespect to those donating materials or doing the work of digitization. My assumption has always been that the poorer quality audio was generally due to the poor quality of tapes that were copies of recordings made 30-40 years ago.

I'd also like acknowledge that lately the updates to this site are often of audio material that already existed here, but was being replaced with audio of better quality. I applaud these efforts.

Finally, though looking back it wasn't at all clear, I was hoping to encourage anyone struggling through the Chinese course to keep going with the carrot that the audio was greatly improved later in the course.

Just clearing the air a bit,

James
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Re: Which basic courses have the best quality audio ?

Postby DaraghM on December 1st, 2009, 6:42 am

I hope my question wasn't a criticism on the existing material. I'm more than grateful for all the work the contributors have put in. I was hoping to construct a simple list, so anyone undecided on which language to study, could select a course with exceptional quality audio material, all other matters considered equal. I'm currently toying with either the Swedish or Bulgarian course, in addition to the aformentioned courses.

My languages studies rely on using the audio a lot, so I tend to weight those I can listen to over and over again. I think the volume of recorded material with the FSI courses makes them by far the best courses for language learners.
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