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MartinS
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Quote MartinS Replybullet Topic: Korean Vol I Tapes
    Posted: 31 October 2008 at 11:45am
About 11 months ago, I downloaded the tapes of FSI Korean Vol. I from the web site

http://outsideinkorea.com/inside/2007/02/a_free_korean_language_course.php

The owner of that site, "Chris", states that these tapes are the original FSI tapes (in contrast to rip-offs like the Barron's course) and are in the public domain.
In this original form, I found the tapes hard to use for several reasons, so I edited them myself in order to make them more usable:

- low-frequency noise (from the tape machine?) filtered away

- all Drills brought into the classical four-stroke scheme (stimulus - student's response - correct response - student's repetition of correct response) and pauses adapted to normal speed of speach; in the original version, many pauses after the stimulus very way too short (some also much too long), and the fourth element, the student's repetition, was never left room for. Later FSI courses usually follow this scheme, so I believe it is no deviation from their intentions to add these pauses in the MP3 instead of relying on the "Pause" button being pressed again and again.

- In order to improve navigability, all tapes were split up into one MP3 file per Dialogue / Drill / Exercise, which usually makes 25-30 files per Unit.

In this form, the tapes have worked very well for me, and I would like to make them available to other users.
I tried to contact the owner of the above-mentioned site, but did not get any answer for a long time. Anyway, with his explicit statement on his site that the material is the original FSI material, being in the public domain, and he has no claims on it, I believe I can go ahead and offer my version of it on your site. As for my work on the files, it is - of course - only technical, not linguistical (very time-consuming nevertheless), and I happily put that part of the whole into the public domain as well.

I think it would be best to pack the files, belonging to one unit, into a ZIP archive for easier download.

So my question to the administrators is: in the situation outlined above, is this material acceptable for contribution to your site?

MartinS
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DemiPuppet
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Quote DemiPuppet Replybullet Posted: 31 October 2008 at 12:46pm
The Text and audio at the site listed was from Barron's "Mastering Korean" as noted in the last paragraph before the text/audio links and wouldn't meet the stringent criteria for posting here (though there is a link to Chris's web site in the Korean forum posted before I was granted administrative abilities). Chris stated that "if it's in the public domain, it's in the public domain, as far as I'm concerned." I think this is true, since as far as I can tell, the "Mastering Korean" books were never registered with the copyright office.

In any event, the Korean Basic Volume 1 audio from actual FSI tapes is available via links I've posted here:

fsi-language-courses.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=661

There are minor differences Barron's and FSI. In particular, Barron's has removed the first sentence "Korean Basic Course" from the original audio.

The audio on Chris's site also appears to have been encoded at a lower bit rate. The audio I posted was encoded at 48Kbit ABR down-sampled to 22K samples/sec (the human voice doesn't have much if any content above 11Khz). It may be worth while comparing the audio quality of both.

Hopefully gdfellows will eventually post these items in the main download section.
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