Aztec "uniforms".  Their purpose was to impress and intimidate the enemy.  For example, anyone coming face to facer with an elite Jaguar Warrior (second from left) would know he was meeting a formidable opponent.

We hope  you find these materials interesting and useful.  If you have any questions [about these materials, the Platiquemos program, or the Spanish language], please don't hesitate to send us an e-maiI.  We'll get back to you promptly, and your message may help another student.

Students' major complaints about the original Foreign Service Institute Program, as sold by Barron's, AudioForum and others, include the almost complete lack of female voices in the audio.   We have corrected this; the Platiquemos audio is over 50% female, including one of the two principal characters in the ongoing story of the adventures of a newly-arrived American in the mythical country of Surlandia.   We have also tripled the number of different native-speaker voices--hearing a variety of speaking styles is important to your learning.  

Also, to help you compare our extensively revised and reformatted version of the program with the copies of the original widely available in bookstores, by mail order and over the internet, we have scanned the full Unit 3 from the copy as sold by Barron's.  Please note that the versions sold by Barron's and others are mechanical reproductions of the originals, and are public domain--that may be one of the reasons they don't offer any samples, so we're doing it for them.  Our version, however, is a "Derivative Work", and as such is registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.  In addition to comparing the formatting, illustrations, ease of use of both Platiquemos and the original FSI version, you might also wish to compare prices.  Ours are in general considerably lower.

Our samples are saved on our server in MP3Pro format to preserve space.  MP3Pro is a new technology that reduces the file sizes by about half, with no loss of quality.  You can read more about MP3Pro here.  www.mp3prozone.com/ ,and you can download a specialized MP3Pro player free.  MP3Pro will play in almost any MP3 player, though.  The final digital versions ("download" and "digital") are in regular mp3 format at CD quality.

If you have trouble downloading, send us an e-mail and we'll work it out.