Customer Reviews

Active Korean

5 star:		(4)
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2 star:		(1)
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This book, "Active Korean," is really good. I picked it up in Korea after buying a half dozen other Korean study books. This one is by far the best I have seen. The layout is great, the chapters provide plenty of reading comprehension and this book shines in the exercises that it provides. The only disappointments that I have about the book are the lack of cassettes for listening comprehension and the sometimes out-dated vocab. This book is truly good. My Korean teacher switched to this book after I showed it to her. You really can learn Korean with this book.

Annyeonghaseyo! For those learning Korean, I think this is one of the great books out there. It has an easy-to-use explanation of Korean phonology (sounds) with a chart in McCune-Reischauer (McR), IPA, Han'geul, and plain English approximations. McR Romanization IS used in the book, but only as a crutch alongside Han'geul for about the first half of the lessons. The lessons themselves start off with several brief dialogs and vocabulary lists. Charts and grammatical notes are there to make things more understandable. Maps and newspapers are also used as learning aids. Like Japanese, Korean verbs and some nouns change to reflect politeness.. In this book, you'll learn a variety of politeness forms and intimacy levels. Sample newspapers and articles are used to give an idea of Korean in "the real world." A small dictionary and the answer key can be found at the end. The authors did a good job in their previous book, Functional Korean, so you won't be disappointed with this!

I have bought almost a dozen books on Korean. This is probably the best one. Most of the other books are not for daily conversation. Learning Korean is like learning 3 languages, because of the politeness level you have to speak at. The biggest hurdle I have in learning Korean is transforming the words from the dictionary form to Formal, Polite, and blunt forms. This book will list both the Formal, and polite form next to each other, so you don't get confused. The english used in this book is also easy to understand. The authors lived in the United States and thus I found it easier to understand. Most of the other Korean language books were written by non native english speakers and they are more like technical books. Most of the other books used too many uncommon english words to teach. I have never written a review for any of the other books before. I felt so good about this book, that I just had to write one. Not only that, I lost this book on an airplane yesterday, and I ordered a second one right away. I'm halfway through the book and I just wish there was a 2nd book.

I got this book, and it made learning the alphabet easy. It spends very little time with phonetic spellings, which is great, because learning the phonetic spellings only slows down the process of learning the language. My Korean friends thought highly of the structure of the book.

I wish it came with a workbook - a way to practice the information so it was more fun. I'm trying to find a DVD or CD to make it more fun. Oh yeah - I paid a lot of the book! Get it at the cheap price while you have the chance.

this was my first korean textbook and in hindsight there were much better options. i highly recommend books by the korean universities, anyone of them.