FSI Bengali Course
Master the Bengali Language Today
Everything you need to learn Bengali is now with the Foreign Service Institute's course.
Get the most comprehensive Bengali course ever created by the FSI and actually learn the language with hours of audio, mp3s, workbooks and PDFs.
Here’s What You Get
Plenty of audio, structured lessons, and clear learning units — everything you need to stay on track and make real progress.
What Language Students Say
Michael R.
Diplomat
"The FSI course materials are incredibly comprehensive. The audio lessons and workbooks helped me achieve fluency much faster than I expected."
Sarah L.
Language Enthusiast
"The bundle download made everything so convenient. Having all materials organized and instantly accessible has been fantastic for my learning journey."
James T.
Business Professional
"The quality of these FSI materials is outstanding. The structured approach and thorough explanations have made learning a new language much more manageable."
What is the FSI Bengali Short Course?
This FSI Bengali short course was published in 1985 and provides a basic introduction to the language, including simple conversations like greetings or exchanging telephone numbers.
It consists of 30 units in total, with each one presenting new language and vocabulary in the form of a dialog.
How was the FSI Bengali Short Course originally used?
This course was originally designed to give US diplomatic staff a grounding in Bengali before being sent to postings in areas where the language is spoken.
They would have spent time studying the dialogs alone outside of class, and they would have also spent time in a classroom going through the material and practicing with a teacher.
This way, after completing the course, they would have gained the basic language skills that would have allowed them to get by in Bengali-speaking areas, managing simple situations with the words and expressions they had learned.
How can you use the FSI Bengali Short Course Basic?
Unfortunately, this course is not well suited for autonomous study, especially if you don’t have any other materials for studying the language. If you try to learn Bengali using this course alone, you are likely to find it all but impossible to make any progress.
However, if you have another Bengali coursebook, especially one that also teaches you how to read and write the script, this course could work well as a source of supplementary input that can help you practice your speaking and listening as well as enlarging your vocabulary in Bengali.
Taking it further
However good your study materials, you will never master Bengali if you don’t practice. For this reason, if you want to make progress in the language, I urge you to take your Bengali skills out into the real world to try them out.
Look for native speakers who can help you practice, perhaps giving you tips on pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar or usage to complement your study. Above all, try to make using Bengali a part of your daily life, and when you do, you will see that you begin to make real progress in the language.