I hope you enjoy our audio lessons and that you find them useful. I am a student of the Lithuanian language and am currently taking a class at St. Casimir's Church in Los Angeles. We are using Beginner's Lithuanian (henceforth refered to as BL) as one of our textbooks. I found some audio files on the internet in which a couple of men read the story and conversation in each chapter. While they are better than nothing, I felt I could do a better job. I started this project to help me learn Lithuanian. If it helps other people, so much the better. I've listened for years to the Lithuanian Outloud podcasts and Learn French By Podcast podcasts and thought I could take some of the ideas from those podcasts and some of my own ideas and create a series of audio lessons. I wrote some scripts using material in BL. In most lessons our native speaker reads the story at the beginning of the chaper once. Then we alternate with the native speaker reading the vocabulary, a pause for the listener to repeat it, and I give the English translation. Then we do the same for the story. Next we study some of the Lithuanian sentences found in the grammer section of each chapter. We finish up by reading the converstion at the end of each chapter with the native speaker reading a phrase, pause, and a translation. Sometimes I add a little material that I think would be useful to know. I try to break up each sentence into small phrases which the listener can remember when he tries to repeat it. I usually study Lithuanian and French with an mp3 player in bed so I'm not looking at the script, so I can handle only a few words at a time. If I studied while sitting in front of a computer I would have probably used longer phrases, but I don't so I didn't. Before starting this project, I didn't know anything about recording audio on a computer. I was constantly experimenting with my recordings. I didn't want to spend any more money than necessary as I don't anticipate doing much more recording. I've tried several different microphones, all of them cheap ones that plug into the sound card on my laptop. Originally I had one microphone intented for VOIP which I shared with my partner. She would hold the printed script and I would move the microphone back and forth between us as we spoke. I recorded in mono. This microphone broke during lesson 14, so I ordered another from Ebay. That one worked ok so I ordered another similar one from Meritline.com. I took a headphone splitter and some stereo to mono adapters and got set up to record each microphone on a separate track. This allows me to adjust the volume on each track. My voice usually records pretty loud so I boost the volume of my partner's voice by 3db or so. I bought a couple cheap gaming headphone/microphone setup and am exprimenting with them. As I record this I've only recorded lessons 1 to 25 but I plan to use the gaming setups for the rest of the sessions. After we are done recording a session I edit the files. I remove our mistakes and some of the odd clicks and other unwanted noises, both human and nonhuman. Sometimes my partner finds an error in the script as we are recording, she corrects it and we rerecord that section, so I have to edit out the uncorrected part. Before we record, my partner reviews the script for errors. Aldona does it when I show at her house. Aušra downloads the scripts from my website, prints them out, corrects them with pencil and I pick them up from her at work. I take them home and edit the script and print them out. After work Aušra stops by on her way home from work and we record. I use a HP DV9812 17" laptop to record. The laptop is running FreeBSD 7.4 and I use audacity as my recording and editting software. I would appreciate any corrections you find and any suggestions you might have to improve these lessons. If you would like to use these scripts to rerecord the lessons, feel free. change them anyway you like. If you let me have your recordings and I think they are better than mine, I'll throw mine away and use yours. I want to thank Aldona, our teacher, for her help. When she left on vacation to Lithuania after lesson 14, Aušra took over. We recorded a dozen lessons until she left on vacation to Lithuania. I thank her for her help. Now Aldona is back and I hope to finish up the last 15 lessons with her. I would be willing to record some other material if I have other Lithuanian speakers. I don't know if Aldona or Aušra will have the time. Today August 9, 2011 I received permission from Hippocrene Books, the publisher of BL, to release my recordings. Be sure to support them by buying the BL book. Thanks for listening. sėkmės