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 FSI Language Courses Forum : Learning Languages : General Discussion
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DogDayAfternoon
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Quote DogDayAfternoon Replybullet Topic: What the Government Printing Office once sold!
    Posted: 08 January 2007 at 1:49am
This memory of mine will probably make you all sick. I does for me when I think back. I recall as a kid (approx. three decades ago) going into a Government Printing Office store near Union Station in Washington, DC (I grew up in a suburb of DC). What I remember is all the language course materials they had for sale. As a teenage kid I had gone into the store looking for stuff on aviation and especially rockets/spaceflight (they did have some NASA stuff). I had no interest in foreign languages at the time and I was confused about what all this stuff was. I recall plain cardboard boxes with tons of audiotapes and manuals. It was all confusing and they seemed to have lots of foreign language-related stuff I couldn't make heads or tails out of it. Now, what I do recall is all this stuff seemed very, very cheap, even for a young kid with little money. I want to say these items were in the single dollars range in price. I remember seeing all this ugly government packaging (the antithesis of eye-catching commerical stuff) and along with the very low prices thinking that this stuff must just be old U.S. government surplus and probably originally meant for government training and thus not otherwise useable.  

Edited by DogDayAfternoon - 08 January 2007 at 1:54am
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Chung
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Quote Chung Replybullet Posted: 08 January 2007 at 8:15am
Well, that's annoying but not surprising. As much as the government is the ultimate creator of the material (thus can charge whatever it wants), when given any chance to fleece the plebes, it'll do it.
 
Just for laughs, I did check out the GPO's website a while ago and found nothing for the FSI courses. Somewhere (it may have been on ERIC), I read that the price for a reprint of a FSI course cost only a few dollars from the GPO, which confirms what you saw as a kid.
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DogDayAfternoon
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Quote DogDayAfternoon Replybullet Posted: 08 January 2007 at 10:59am

I did go back there when I was a bit older. I was in college with an interest in learning Russian and Eastern European languages. Recalling all the language stuff they had I made a trip down there. I was all excited when I found the store in the same place, but when I went in it it was immediately clear that this was not the same store. There were no language products and all the old government stuff had been replaced by glossy and glitzy stuff at fairly high prices.  

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