22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Incorrect pronunciation, September 8, 2007
This review is from: Elementary Korean (Tuttle Language Library) (Book & CD) (English and Korean Edition) (Hardcover)
*You would have to encode the page to "Korean", or you will not see the Korean character examples below.*
My husband (Chinese-American) recently purchased this book on the basis of all of the glowing reviews and I have to say I was shocked to discover the errors on the pronunciation of a few of the Korean consonants and vowels. I have not gone through the rest of book yet with my husband but after seeing the error in the pronunciation guide in lesson 3 of the book, I felt compelled to write a review, especially since the rest of the book is based on these basic sounds. As a native Korean speaker, I would like to clarify these errors.
The most difficult consonant sounds in the Korean language for a non-Korean speaker to distinguish are "b" and "p" sounds and "g"(the hard kind, as in "gun") and "k", and "j" and "ch" sounds. For example in the book, they explain the "¤²" is to pronounce is as "p as in park, but relaxed." This is incorrect. It's actually a "b" sound as an "bunk", therefore a more relaxed "b", but definitely NOT a "p". Instead of describing sounds of "b", "j" and "g" the book incorrectly uses variations of "p", "ch", and "k" to describe these sounds.
When a learner hears let say the "b" in "banchan" spoken fast by a Korean speaker within a sentence, the person might indeed hear "panchan", with some kind of a "p". But I would like to stress that this would be an incorrect way of learning. For a native speaker, there's a definite difference between those two sounds.
Another error I would like to note is the pronunciations for "¤Ä" and "¤À". In the book those two vowels are described as "a as in bat" and "e as in bet". The fact is, there really isn't a difference; it is always the "e as in bet". If you pronounce "¤Ä" as "a as in bat", it would make you sound less like a native. I can sadly imagine someone who has completed this book pronouncing "yes" in Korean incorrectly as "nah" when the correct pronunciation would be "neh".
To sum up this review, here's an excerpt I found:
"The more difficult aspect for the beginner is the difference in sound values of b and p sounds, j and ch,and t and d. This is compounded by the widely diverging romanization systems used for Korean: Lukoff, Yale, Horne, and McCune-Reischauer. This confusion can be easily avoided however if you learn the Korean script, Hangul, as soon as possible, and skip the middle step of romanization completely. This is strongly advised, because it will save valuable time, lessen your confusion, and greatly enhance the speed with which you learn Korean. It will also help you to avoid spelling mistakes (there are two T's, two P's, etc.in the script) when you start to write Korean Hangul script."
Most readers of this book will probably not have a native Korean speaker to point out these errors so I just wanted you to be aware. The grammar and dialogues in this book seems fine, but it is important for Korean learners to learn how to pronounce the Korean alphabet correctly and then tackle the rest of the grammar in this book.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A friendly textbook, June 4, 2008
This review is from: Elementary Korean (Tuttle Language Library) (Book & CD) (English and Korean Edition) (Hardcover)
As a basic textbook for students, "Elementary Korean" is detailed and besides offering you also some simple exercises for practice basics, it answers "friendly" to many questions and doubts one can have with regard to Korean language. Though it aims to university level learning (and it is effective), you can consider it almost as a kind of friendly "human" teacher, for its "voice" is really nice.
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