This site is dedicated to language learners. You will find here the FSI, DLI and Peace-Corps courses. I wrote some tutorials to help learners to import vocabulary lists, to digitalize documents into modifiable content, to record lists of words/phrases. I rebuilt the defunt Shtooka website, so the content is not lost. A copy of the shtooka collections and programs is also kept here.
The FSI and the Peace-Corps parts are finished, and DLI is on the way, other parts too. Don't forget to report bad links. Thank you.
The translation of the site in French, Russian and German is on the way. French is pretty advanced. Translation of the first page in German done (thanks yabbes!)
The pages in other languages are not in sync ... sorry
The Old fsi-language Website » (NOT maintained any more ...)
New! Update (29th of October 2018) 7 new Cortina languages courses!
French, German, Greek, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Vietnamese
A correspondant re-recorded (professional recording)the 12 last lessons of Cortina-Russian.
Go to the correspondant section to grab them.
See the Cortina section :)
New! Helen Abadzi section
(10th of May 2020)Helen sent me a lot of rare resources, she collected along the years. May be some copyrights infringements but the documents are old, the authors are dead.
If there is a problem, my email is available in the contact section. I'll erase the corresponding documents.
Thanks a lot!
The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the United States federal government's primary training institution for employees of the U.S. foreign affairs community, preparing American diplomats as well as other professionals to advance U.S. foreign affairs interests overseas and in Washington.
- excerpt from Wikipedia
The courses available here are "old" courses. Cross the informations here with more recent sources as the vocabulary may have changed.
The Defense Language Institute (DLI) is a United States Department of Defense (DoD) educational and research institution, which provides linguistic and cultural instruction to the Department of Defense, other Federal Agencies and numerous customers around the world. ... Other functions include planning, curriculum development, and research in second-language acquisition.
- excerpt from Wikipedia
The courses available here are "old" courses. Cross the informations here with more recent sources as the vocabulary may have changed.
The Peace Corps is a volunteer program run by the United States government. The stated mission of the Peace Corps includes providing technical assistance, helping people outside the United States to understand American culture, and helping Americans to understand the cultures of other countries.
- excerpt from Wikipedia
These courses are mostly developed by volunteers and are available for a large set of languages with some very rare ones .
Shtooka was a project launched in 2006/2007 aimed to record and tag lists of vocabulary in different languages
These lists are compiled into "collections" in various audio format such ogg, flac, mp3 speex.
Technical information about the recording, linguistic information, copyrights are kept in tags embedded in the audio file. Search for swac tags in this page to get more information
The original web site was down for a very long moment, so I built a copy with the help from the Internet Archives. The new Shtooka web site maintained by Nicolas Vion is here The new Shtooka Website »
The audio collections are collections of audio files of lists of vocabulary/phrases properly tagged
You'll find them in different audio format
Collections in Arabic, Belarussian, Czech, Chinese/Mandarin, German, English, Italian, French, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Serbian, Ukrainian, Wolof, Wuu/Shanghainese are available here.
You may download file by file, or an entire collection at once.
Here are some programs built to manage, browse the Shtooka collections. Some of them are quite old (like mine written in Python), some were written at the beginning of the project
Be aware that the database format used by the swac* programs changed and some old programs cannot run with this new format.
New programs which use the new database format were written by Nicolas Vion, but are only available as "source". I'll try to compile them for different platforms as soon as I get some free time ... yes ... an eternal problem
The tutorial section will be devoted to various domains such digitizing documents, splitting audio etc ...
I did ocred many FSI/DLI documents which you can find in the WIP section, and I'll explain how I did that, the tools I used, explanations about the format chosen.
A tutorial about how to split and tag audio files with Audacity is already in the pipeline.
The WIP section contains all my digitizing works: mostly FSI and DLI.
The documents are available in different formats (docbook, pdf, epub, csv). I use the XML format, so I can extract vocabulary/phrases and in the future, maybe translate the documents, and generate different outputs like HTML, PDF, EPUB.
Cortina is a company which developped language courses.
The Cortina language materials (French, German, Greek, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Vietnamese) have been made available on this Website by the kind permission of the holder of the copyright, Magdalen Livesey, the President of Cortina International, Inc.
You'll find here some very rare and valuable resources, audio and texts, gathered over the years of learning, searching for language learning resources.
These are resources for the following languages:
Updated the 3th of June