Sunshine Language School

Wanting to learn German? Well you can now do so using the FSI system absolutely free from the 200 Words a Day! German learning website.

The course is over 330 pages long -in pdf format - and you simply enrol, then receive all the lessons by email, each one being sent at three day intervals direct to your inbox. You can download the mp3 audio files so that you can listen to the accompanying 20 or so hours of German lessons on the audio.

The FSI is of course the Foreign Service Institut, which is the department of the United States State Department that is responsible for the foreign language training of US diplomatic corps staff. And as you can imagine their need for high quality language training is of great importance, and so the courses are very high quality, very indepth and very thorough. Some of the material is a little out of date, and the print-outs are done on those old type-writers from the 1960’s, but just put that to one side, and enjoy the high quality of course material.

The courses are designed to be used with a classroom German teacher and the student is supposed to listen to the material at home, then come to the lesson fully prepared, having done the study at home. If you have a teacher that is well and good, and you can use the FSI course as your study guide.

The course is equally fine to be used as a self-study German course. You can listen to the audio on your iPod etc or save the mp3 to a CD and play them in your car, or on the train, bus, plane etc. Print out the lesson pages and put them in a binder so that you can read them, annotate them and write all over them.

Anyway - you can pay as much as $250 for this course online, or you can get it free from the folks at 200 Words a Day accelerated language learning school. The 200 Words a Day people normally make their own software which focusses on rapid learning of foreign language vocabulary and they also have their own Learn German courses which are software courses designed for accelerated language learning using Memory Triggers that make it easier to remember the words by using word association.