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Where are your courses from?
These courses were
originally produced for the U.S. Government for a very specialized
purpose. The Government has language schools whose sole purpose
is to provide its students with the best language training available
anywhere in the world, and at any price. The students sent to
these schools are not diplomats or embassy personnel, but people
who will fill positions much more in-depth and demanding, such
as linguists and interpreters. These are language-intensive fields
where fluency is an absolute requirement. While attending these
specialized schools, the students use the very courses offered
by The Language Warehouse. Now you can study these same courses
to achieve the same level of proficiency! I must emphasize
that The Language Warehouse courses are NOT the Foreign Service
Institute (FSI) courses that you may have seen advertised in other
places!
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Why haven’t I ever heard of these courses?
Unless you attended
one of these specialized schools, there’s really no reason for
you to have. The U.S. Government routinely spends countless billions
of dollars a year having private companies develop products for
its own use, with no intention of advertising or selling them.
These courses are a result of that spending. Now, such behavior
would be suicide for a company in the private sector, where the
development of a language course requires spending as little
as possible on product development so that the lion's share can
be allocated for advertisement. Underhanded? No. It's just
a necessity of business. Unfortunately, "this savings is
passed on to the customer" and you end up not only
buying the product, but footing the company's advertising bill!
The Language Warehouse French Course is different because for
a small sum you can own the best French course in the world, without
footing the bill for development costs or advertising!
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Why are your Basic courses so big?
Can’t I just learn a language from five or six cassettes?
That depends on how
thoroughly you want to learn the language. For example, imagine
for a moment that you have a friend who doesn't’t speak English.
He tells you about a six-cassette English course he just bought,
and says that he intends to use it to learn English. What’s the
first thing you’ll think? You’ll probably wonder how a student’s
ear can even become accustomed to how the English language sounds
in so few cassettes, let alone actually learning it. And
you’d be right. As speakers of English, it’s easy for us to imagine
learning another language from a six or ten-cassette course,
because we don’t usually realize just how darned much you really
have to learn about a language before you can use it in even the
crudest terms. Now, when we think of this concept in terms of
a foreign person learning our own language, knowing English
as we do, we can readily appreciate the need for ample audio exposure
for any student wanting to learn it!
Some companies
claim that their ten or twelve or sixteen-cassette courses will
to bring you to “fluency” (an incredibly subjective and much-abused
term!), but the reality is that there’s just not enough time on
the tapes. Learning another language can be one of the most rewarding
things you’ll ever have the opportunity to do, but it can’t be
forced or hurried! When it comes to cassette language courses,
the student simply cannot be cheated out of the audio portion!
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Why are your courses different from the other cassette courses
I’ve seen?
a)- They are comprehensive.
When these courses were developed by the U.S. Government, the
ONLY goal was to provide the most comprehensive and effective
language-teaching curriculum available anywhere. Unluckily for
the taxpayers as a whole, cost was not a factor in the development.
But luckily for us language lovers, you can now own the best course
around for a price all out of proportion to its original production
cost!
b)- They
are bigger. Our Basic Spanish and French courses cover the
whole language, but more importantly, they give you enough audio
and sufficient examples so that you'll actually understand and
absorb what you are hearing. It’s unbelievable what a positive
effect over 50 hours of audio will have on your learning curve!
Finish one of our Basic courses and it’ll be hard to imagine not
being able to speak and understand the language!
c)-
They are affordable. If you have been considering learning
another language by means of the other cassette courses out there,
you’ve probably discovered that they’re not cheap! Most
of these courses range anywhere from $15 to over $25 per cassette
(we keep ours right around $3 per cassette). As you'll see below,
the poor customer gets stuck paying for much more than the product
he actually ends up with!
We maintain
our affordability in several ways. I want to take a moment and
explain this part, because some people have expressed concern
that The Language Warehouse French Course is somehow "inferior"
to those other overpriced courses out there! In actuality, nothing
could be farther from the truth! We just avoid those expensive
"tack-ons" that run up the price.
First, we
don’t spend millions of dollars mailing out expensive brochures
to everyone in the country. Have you ever received those
fancy brochures on the mail for one of those cassette language
courses out there? Not only is the postage for direct mail is
very expensive, but you can bet that those fancy brochures aren't
cheap. But even if you haven't personally received any of these
in the mail, I have received dozens of them. Who do you think
pays for the ones that were sent to me? Right. The savings is
passed on to the customer.
Second, we
avoid expensive packaging,
like those cassette albums you may have seen with the full-color
eye-catching designs on the front. Instead of colorful packaging,
we decided to offer our course in plain brown cardboard. If we
start receiving complaints on this, we may have to change, but
so far, brown cardboard is fine with our valued customers.
Third, we
don’t launch expensive advertising campaigns or take out costly
newspaper and magazine advertising ads. Do you want to
pay for that, too? We didn't think so! The only advertising cost
we pass on to our customers is the 0$ that we pay for the
free advertising we do on the internet.
And fourth,
our texts are %100 online. If you've ever tried
one of those other cassette programs, you've undoubtedly noticed
the scarcity of the written material. Why would they skimp on
this? Because not only does text cost money to produce, it also
costs money to ship! We decided to forego both of these costs
and, you guessed it.... pass the savings on to the customer.
The Language
Warehouse is a 100% internet business. Our philosophy is pretty
straightforward: why not serve the customer by using the incredible
power of the internet to lower product costs as much as possible?
Now THAT'S passing the savings on to the customer!
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What about the accompanying texts for your courses?
For our French Basic
course, we offer the texts in two formats- HTML and RTF. With
the HTML version, the student can navigate through the texts just
as if he or she were on an internet page. All that is required
is an internet browser like Netscape or Internet Explorer. Virtually
any version of any browser will display our texts just fine. RTF
is a widely-used word processing format that supports the special
characters used in the French language. These RTF texts can be
viewed in any word processor, and then printed out by the student
if desired. If you’d like access to all of the texts for our French
course, all you have to do is send a blank Email message to our
autoresponder at french-info@tlwh.com.
In seconds, you’ll receive our sales letter as well as the page
address where you can download our texts. If you prefer not to
download anything, this page also has all the lessons available
for viewing online, so that you can view them and print them right
from your browser window without downloading anything! We’ve found
that this “online only” arrangement is easier and more convenient
for everyone, than sending an actual floppy disk with the course.
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What are “HTML” and “RTF” formats, and why do you use them?
Html, or "HyperText
Markup Language", is simply the way documents are formatted
so that they can be viewed on the Worldwide Web. What you’re looking
at right now was written in HTML format. If you haven’t done so
yet, please request our autoresponder message and go to out text
download page to see just how attractive and easy these html texts
are. RTF, or “rich text format” is simply a word processing format
that allows these texts to be opened and viewed by virtually any
word processing program. RTF was chosen because it is supported
by almost every word processing program on the planet, and it
allows for the printing of the French special characters.
Unlike HTML
format, RTF format allows the student to use the usual word processor
functions to modify the size, font, etc., of the characters. Html
and RTF were chosen because they allow for the printing of the
texts by the student. Nearly all foreign languages use what are
known as “extended ascii” characters- â, à, and ç being a few
of these. Other electronic-book programs were tried, and subsequently
discarded. These programs displayed the foreign text just fine
on the computer screen, but would not allow for printing of these
extended characters! So the only way to accomplish both tasks
was to supply the texts in HTML or RTF format. This way, no special
word processing programs are required on the part of the student.
We offer the
Spanish Basic Course and Headstart courses only in HTML format.
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There’s not very much English in the texts! How will I know what’s
going on?
You'll have no problem!
Each lesson centers around the dialogue, which contains an English
translation in the text. Read the dialogue in English, then listen
to the dialog in French or Spanish on the cassette. Now you’re
familiar with the grammar and vocabulary that will be covered
in the lesson. The balance of the recorded portion is dedicated
to further review of the material that has already been covered
in the dialog, manipulating it in many different ways so that
the student becomes fully familiar with what he or she is actually
learning in that lesson. This format is an excellent way to learn
a language. Always keep in mind that each lesson builds on what
has already been learned in previous lessons. You will never be
left wondering “what’s going on” in a lesson!
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Is your course available on CDs?
No. The current hype
of compact disks has led everyone to offer everything- including
language courses- on CDs. But as vast as the storage capacity
of a CD may be, it can only hold about 70 minutes of audio, which
is less (and much more fragile!) storage than even a regular old
C90 audio-cassette! This means that one of our Basic courses
would require more than 50 CDs!
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What if I’m not satisfied with your course?
No problem at all. We offer a 60-day unconditional refund, and
all we ask is that you: 1)- return the course in resalable condition,
and 2)- call us first! What could be more fair than that? To this
date we’ve not had a single course returned, out of over 1,000
courses shipped. We're proud of that.
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Do you have other courses in the works?
Yes! To accompany our French and Spanish Basic series, we will
soon be offering our German (68 cassettes) versions of the Basic
series, as well as a series of 15-cassette "Headstart"
courses in Spanish, French, Italian and German. These Headstart
courses concentrate less on the grammar and structure of the language,
and more on the actual survival needs of someone visiting another
country. And they work beautifully when used in conjunction with
the Basic course!
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