Indo-European Languages Tutorials

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 for free download at FSI Language Courses 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, but it's a very time-consuming project.

I am beginning with the French Basic Course (Revised) and the German Basic Course. I will also add notes where appropriate if the language has changed, i.e. if a certain word is no longer used. For this project, I am currently using Universal Document Converter to change the PDF files into individual JPGs, and then using Softi Free OCR to change the JPGs to text.

For faster downloads of the mp3 files, try using the DownThemAll add-on with Firefox.

I welcome any and all help with this project!