Listening Texts

I ni se! Welcome to the Listening Texts book!

These narrated texts are a useful complement to practice the grammar covered in the Advanced Beginner Coursebook and Intermediate Coursebook.

They start out simple and get increasingly complex as you go along.

Details

The audio recordings from this collection stem from the following public domain textbooks that were financed by the US government:

  • Charles Bird, John Hutchison, and Mamadou Kanté, An Ka Bamanankan Kalan: Beginning Bambara. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University African Studies Center, 1977).

  • Long, Ronald W., and Raoul S. Diomande. 1968. Basic Dyula: Grammatical Outline and Introductory Exercises. Intensive Language Training Center: Indiana University.

To make the audio useful for modern usage via the Internet, I have substantially “reworked” them in various ways, such as:

  • I segmented digitizations of the original audio tapes into smaller individual files (so that specific segments of the original tape could be easily listed to without needing to scroll or cue up a specific moment in the timeline)
  • I cleaned, edited and removed unnecessary pauses of the smaller segments for a better and more realistic listening experience

Additionally, I have transcribed each audio segment into modern Latin-based Manding orthography that deviates from the original found in the textbooks.