Includes 24 sixty-minute audio cassette tapes, and a 542-page textbook. Spoken Language Services is "the original self-study language teacher." Featuring techniques pioneered by professional linguists during World War II, these no-nonsense courses have been used successfully by thousands of students to jump-start their foreign language training. No other method has proved more effective than the simple listen-and-imitate method these courses employ. In fact, it is the same way we all learned as children to speak our native language! Most of the courses in the Spoken Language Series were prepared originally by professional linguists under the aegis of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Linguistic Society of America. Books are self-instructional and are accompanied by cassettes keyed to the course material. Cassettes are recorded by native speakers and cover conversations, pronunciation exercises, and TRUE-FALSE tests. Each word or phrase is spoken first in English* and then twice in the language of the course, with a pause after each utterance to allow the listener to repeat and imitate. The cassettes can be used for practice without the text. Grammatical explanations are given for the language content already learned. The learner gets systematic development of the linguistic structure instead of first learning a grammar and then trying to fit utterances into it. Course material covered in Book I is roughly equivalent to one semester's intensive study (8 class hours per week with 30 hours outside practice). At the end of the course the learner should have a good grounding in everyday vocabulary, grammar, and usage, and be able to communicate with native speakers. This could be exactly the course that you are looking for!
