FSI Chinese for download

[OneEye]

I thought this could be helpful to some people here (particularly beginners I think). One of the guys at how-to-learn-any-language.com has digitized a good portion of the FSI Standard Chinese: A Modular Approach and put it on Megaupload and Rapidshare. Apparently his copy (1979) is public domain so it's legal. He has modules 1-6 and 9 (Orientation, Biography, Money, Directions, Transportation, Arranging a Meeting, and Life in China) and the Resource modules. Here's the thread:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=2201

You can also get some of it on this site, but it's a work in progress. There are a few other languages there too, including some Cantonese.

http://fsi-language-courses.com/

Enjoy the free stuff!

[lokki]

How useful do you people actually think it would be, considering it is from 1979?

Is it worth bothering with at all, even though it is free?

What year is the current version from, that you have to pay for, and how different is it from the 1979 vintage?

[OneEye]

From what I understand, it's a great program, although I believe some of it is a bit outdated. The current one, as far as I know, isn't much different at all from this one. Add about a $1500 price tag to it, and it makes this an incredible deal, slightly outdated or not, in my opinion.

[necroflux]

Note that this isn't to say I don't appreciate the link OneEye, because I very much do. But..

My opinion: If you want to instantaneously douse every last ounce of enthusiasm you have or will ever have for learning Chinese, start listening/reading this material. I feel lucky to have escaped, motivation intact, after listening for about 10 seconds.. lol. It really was that bad for me.

[OneEye]

necroflux, thanks for the heads up. I plan on using this as just another tool to help, not as the main way of learning. I found it a bit boring too.

[necroflux]

Yeah, I'm trying to think of what I consider to be more interesting options.. and honestly other than chinesepod.com I haven't found a lot out there that I would consider interesting. Pimsleur used to be what I would consider the most boring option but compared to FSI it's got a pulse, so check that out if you haven't yet. And actually the Rosetta Stone Mandarin stuff is pretty decent for learning vocab, since at least you get nice pictures to look at. (Both of the aforementioned items are readily available for "testing purposes" via Bittorrent if you know where to look.)

All in all though the best cure for boredom is rapidly switching up your resources, at least for me. So for some this FSI stuff might be a good counterpart to the rest of their materials at hand.

[OneEye]

Yeah I actually got the Pimsleur a while back "from my library" and used it for a while, then I got lazy and dropped Mandarin altogether for a while, and just recently picked it back up. I still have the Pimsleur in iTunes, and I imagine Rosetta Stone wouldn't be too hard to find on bit torrent or Usenet (alt.binaries.world-languages). To try before I buy...of course.

[lokki]

I have started downloading FSI now. Any ideas on where to get hold of the missing parts (module 7 and 8 and also the audio for modules 5 and 6 which is missing there) ?

[PheonixUK]

I think they will upload the rest over time.

[rherschbach]

Appreciate finding out about this...I was curious what these were like. I downloaded a few of the mp3s yesterday; it's pretty dry, repetitive stuff. However, at my fairly low level I can see it being useful as an extra tool for boosting listening comprehension.

The approach seems to be to provide the Mandarin sentences at high speed, so you get used to that speaking pace. And then they are repeated...and repeated...and repeated (with a pleasant-sounding female speaker urging you on). So if you missed it the first 999 times, you'll finally get it.

The sound quality is uneven, and the some of the content is anachronistic -- though, on the other hand, it has a certain retro charm.

Thanks for the links, anyway!