Customer Reviews

Elementary Korean (Tuttle Language Library) (Book & CD) (English and Korean Edition)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

*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.

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.

This book is great, along with some other supplemental material I can already read Korean in a few hours of studying. The cd that comes with it helps a lot with the pronunciation.

Unlike Rosetta Stone software, which costs an arm and a leg and sucks, this resource is a great learning tool. It's very real world and the pacing is slow enough for a new learner. Love it.

This book is perfect in every way and was the major, if not central, contributor to my fluency in Korean. The grammar is perfect for the second and third year of a Korean course and the dialogues have a very rich and native flavor to them. The vocabulary is extremely useful and complete. I believe that complete is the exact word for this. This book is complete in every way from the table of contents to the very accessible glossaries in the back.

With the CD that comes with it or a standalone textbook, this book is ideal. The exercises within it are perfect and they reinforce what was learned in the previous chapter. Even the cheesy reading passages are appropriate for the corresponding skill level of a learner at the corresponding level for every chapter.

The color of the cover, the layout of the book is perfect; the font is perfect. The quality of the paper is perfect. Even the introduction is perfect. And the mistake count? To be honest I read this whole book and it only has 4 mistakes in all of its 500 pages. That's like less than 0.01% - as flawless as a book gets in my book.

The only problem I found with this book was that the subsequent volume that Ross King promises within it has not been delivered. Long story short, if all foreign language textbooks were like this, the world would be a more polyglotal(polyglotish?) place.

I put this book in my "Required" list 'cause my most trusted friend who's Korean recommended it for me. He said it's a very good textbook, up-to-date and well structured. So let's say it was approved by a native speaker, and that's very important.
One thing - it can be a little intimidating for beginners, but don't give up so easily! It's a great textbook so make sure you're making the most of it.

Good luck with your Korean! *^.^*

Copy it onto your hard drive, and play it in Windows Media Player, using the Play/Pause button to give yourself a little extra time to repeat what you hear. It's not as clumsy as it sounds.

The MP3 files that come with this book only have vocabulary for chapters 1, 2, and 5. The authors leave it up to everyone else to figure out the vocabulary from the Hangul. Although I can read and write Hangul, this is very cumbersome. In addition, the files do not have any English, so it is very difficult to listen to the vocabulary files that they do include unless you are sitting there with the textbook.

I'm a music student and there's a lot of Koreans at my school. So I wanted to get a book that would help me communicate with them. I perused the book and it looks very well-constructed and serious.

I've got very little free time, so I've only studied the first few chapters. This has already helped me A LOT! I can have little standard conversations and I'm able to quickly learn new words by listening to Koreans talk, because the language makes more sense to me now.

I bought this book for self study and spent some months using it.

The structure is quite familiar to whom has already been studying languages, various lessons are divided into a text, vocabulary, grammar notes and excercises.

Talking about the general structure, I think the lessons are too long (an average of about 20 pages per lesson) so that it is difficult to study them in small time portions (takes about a week to cover a lesson). Many lessons cover too many structures and grammar points so that the exercise can't focus on all of them.

Anyway I'd like to analyze the lacking points in each section of an average lesson.

The text is always too short, uses structures that are not going to be covered in the same lesson and in my opinion is something the authors barely took care of being generally frustrating to read and unuseful to memorize.

Vocabulary section in each lesson cover a hundred or more words, the most part of wich never appears anywhere else in the lesson making it pointless to remember the as you're not going to see them anywhere else (it's like studying from a dictionary).

Grammar notes are pointlessly complicated (especially when explaining verb endings) and stress futile points (like when to pause when using certain particles) while leaving the important explanations unclear.

About the exercises, they are overwhelmingly numerous yet poor in variety.
They are the kind of exercise you may find in a mid-80s textbook, with lots of meaningless writin to do.

This all adds to odd translations and outdated korean spelling.

I would never reccomend this book for studying Korean.
I know it is one of the few being available in English, however I suggest to buy one of the textbooks that are printed in Korea by one of the many universities that hold korean summer courses.