FSI Lesson Material

The US State Department’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI) has made much of their language training material publicly available. It can be found on-line at: http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/

The course contains a large amount of material and seems to be of reasonable quality, although somewhat dated. I have only dabbled briefly with it, so can’t judge its effectiveness. The content is from the 1970’s, and includes this interesting passage (click box to increase size):

Of course, this custom is no longer applicable. I tried addressing a native-speaking acquaintance using the term “tóng zhì”, and was informed that outside of high level Communist Party business, this word's primary usage now is as slang for “homosexual”.