FSI French Basic Revised: Enhanced Digital Version
Enhanced digital version of FSI French Basic course, with audio, text, and exercises. Available free on the web or as a podcast. 70 hours of audio across 24 units.
The U.S. Foreign Service Institute's French Basic Course is a public domain language course, published in its revised version in 1976. It was originally intended for use during intensive language courses for diplomats. The course consists of audio recordings and a student textbook.
On this website, you can listen to the audio recordings, split into individual exercises and accompanied by the corresponding text from the student textbook. You can also follow the course using a podcast player with the textbook synced to the audio. The episodes of the podcast are tagged using podcast chapters, allowing you to skip to each exercise. Your podcast player will also display images of the corresponding text while you listen. I recommend Pocket Casts for the best experience. Spotify does not show images, and Apple Podcasts skews the images.
The course is divided into 24 units, 20 of which are available on this website and through the podcast. The remaining four units can be studied based on the original course book, which is freely available for download. The total duration of the audio recordings is more than 70 hours.
Each unit begins with a dialogue, introducing vocabulary and grammar. The dialogue is followed by a series of exercises, as well as explanations of grammar and vocabulary. The exercises include Lexical Drills, Grammar Learning Drills, Practice Drills, and Question and Response Drills.
To follow the exercises, you should mostly focus on the audio, and only refer to the text when necessary. Most exercises work by introducing a sentence, having you repeat it, then introducing a new word to be substituted into the sentence, and having you say the whole sentence with the new word. Then the new sentence is repeated in the audio, after which you repeat it one more time. Here is an example from Unit 5:
Audio: Je suis allé à Versailles. You repeat: Je suis allé à Versailles.
Audio: à Paris. You say: Je suis allé à Paris.
Audio confirms: Je suis allé à Paris. You repeat: Je suis allé à Paris.
Audio: au café. You say: Je suis allé au café. etc.
Here are links for accessing the podcast:
Screenshots of the podcast in Apple Podcasts and Pocket Casts:
The course book is available for download in PDF format: Volume 1 (8MB, 476 pages) and Volume 2 (11MB, 577 pages).
Useful links:
- The course Mastering French Conversation by Scott Brians is a contemporary course (2015) loosely based on the FSI French Basic Course. Some of the course materials provide useful explanation of how to follow the method of the FSI course, especially the first pages of the transcript.
- fsi-languages.yojik.eu provides downloads of the original audio recordings and course book, as well as supplementary exercises.
- Discussion thread on the Language Learners Forum.
This website, the podcast feed, and the underlying data including tags of the individual exercises were created by Dominik Peters. The audio recordings and the student textbook are in the public domain.