Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Non-Polyglots Beware!, August 15, 2003
I speak numerous Asian languages but still have found Mr. Kim's product to be incredibly difficult to follow. The beginning section on learning Korean script is decent enough, but the book falls apart after that. I just finished exercises from a certain lesson which tested me on grammatical structures that are not introduced until three lessons later--rediculous!! You are constantly introduced to new material (not just nouns, which can be easily looked up in the glossary, but also more complex grammatical structures) in lessons, only to find that this material is not actually introduced (and, thus, defined) until later chapters. If you spend enough time searching through the glossary or subsequent lessons, you can eventually find the answer you seek, however, I have found this quite cumbersome and a serious impediment to learning Korean as quickly as I had hoped. Often, I have to give up searching for answers in the book and go to a Korean-speaking friend for an answer. I wouldn't say it has been a total loss though, as I have been picking it up incrementally by referring to these friends, other books, and dictionaries. I would say if this is your first experience learning a foreign language, then keep looking, but for those of you who have prior experience studying a foreign language (especially Japanese) then you may be able to survive through it as I am doing. While at first I intended this book and its tapes to be my primary source for learning Korean, it is increasingly becoming just one of many resources. Everyone learns languages differently though, so if disorganization and hair-pulling is your style, then by all means jump right in!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very immersive approach!, September 29, 2003
This review is from: Colloquial Korean (Colloquial Series) (Paperback)
Let me start by saying... if you are going to buy this course, make sure you buy the TAPES. I noticed they sold the book by itself at the bookstore, without the tapes, but you are going to get nowhere like that. Nothing is spelled out phoenetically in the book, and the relationships they draw between korean sounds and english sounds don't sound even close to the actual pronunciations presented on the tapes. In short: IF YOU DON'T BUY THE TAPES YOU WILL BE WASTING YOUR MONEY IMO. Having said all that, I absolutely LOVE this book. Instead of dumbing down the language and spelling everything in "english" (a book I saw, "korean in plain english", comes to mind), you learn how to write and pronounce korean script right from the start... and it is a lot easier than most people think! To be honest, within the first hour or two of using this course, I could listen to the speaker on the tape and write the word he/she just said before I even looked at my book. Yes, this book requires some thinking and effort, and if you are looking for an easy, learn-Korean-in-15-minutes approach, then you will be happier with another language course. If, however, you are truly looking to learn Korean, beginning as you did with English by learning the "alphabet" and the sounds of the language, this is the right course for you.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
No such thing as a perfect language textbook . . ., February 11, 2004
This review is from: Colloquial Korean (Colloquial Series) (Paperback)
Kim's text is far from useless but I think its' main problem is that it is too compact. I bought the complete book/cassetts/CD set in Taipei before coming to Korea and it was hard to follow, but that does not mean that it is useless. It's just that there's not really such a thing as a perfect Korean learning book. His grammatical points have so far been shown to be helpful if you do as I do and use several different sources while learning. Locally-produced texts tend not to understand quite what foreigners residing in Korea are looking for (tantamount to saying that they don't understand foreigners here! ^_^) and most of what you find tends to be rather "touristy", so a good text is worth its weight in gold. Bottom line - Kim's text is useful as long as you have either the cassettes or the CDs with the book. But learning Korean seems to be badly affected by the persistently poor quality of teaching/learning materials generally.
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