There’s no shortage of apps and online courses that are purportedly the best way to learn a new language. Whether you want to brush up on your high school Spanish or start over, you can turn to Duolingo (the been accused looting users’ personal information) or a paid option like Rosetta Stone or Coursera, but there is another proven, completely free alternative: you can learn a new language like a US diplomat.
The Institute for the Foreign Service (FSI), which trains professionals to live overseas serving the U.S. government, is known for its excellent foreign language teaching – and you have free access to its course materials and detailed audio instructions.
How to use the Foreign Service’s language courses
Unfortunately, you can’t call the FSI and ask to send you the full curriculum of their Yoruba or Hebrew courses, but you can find both languages - in addition to many, many others on the Live Lingua language learning site. The FSIs were previously available online elsewhere (we even wrote about them.) more than a decade ago), but this site is no longer accessible.
While Live Lingua is primarily an online Spanish teacher, the website has much of the official FSI curriculum for 40 languages, including audio lessons and downloadable PDFs. All FSI offers include 127 courses, 161 e-books and 4,169 audio lessons.
The curriculum has proven effective; It was developed to prepare people to live and work in countries where they have important tasks to perform, even though they have a limited understanding of the mother tongue. You need to be somewhat self-sufficient and commit to studying with only audio files and PDFs (although Live Lingua offers online tutoring for a fee).
The materials you will be consulting are quite old – several decades or more – which is not ideal if you prefer your teaching to be anchored in a more modern context, but the very foundation of a language has not really changed dramatically since then, let’s say in the 1980s, so the materials will still be quite effective. And don’t worry about abusing government resources or stumbling over something that is only for civil servants, as all of the FSI materials Live Lingua hosts are in the public domain (as are other free language learning resources on the website of the Peacekeepers and the Defense Languages Institute).
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