Customer Reviews

In-Flight Korean: Learn Before You Land

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I listened to the audio book version downloaded from my local public library website.

The product offers a selection of useful phrases, grouped by category - at the airport, at a restaurant, etc. Phrases are usually said once in English, once in Korean. (In the Numbers chapter everything is said twice.) The Korean speaker is female, so male students looking to imitate a native male voice will be disappointed. Some phrases are said too quickly, but listeners with media players such as OverDrive Media Console can slow down the playback speed.

At a minimum, listeners need good rote memorization skills, the patience to listen to the recording multiple times and a preference for auditory-only learning styles in order to use this product. Beyond that, only those who've studied Korean for one year at university AND who want a quick review before getting on the plane to Korea for the first time will benefit from listening to it. This is because typical first-year Korean courses don't usually include such information as "Help!", "Stop, thief!", or "Please call an ambulance."

I knew no Korean, but was going to travel there, so I borrowed this item from the library (fortunately I didn't waste my money to buy it!) to try to learn a bit of Korean. I didn't learn a thing.

The lesson goes way to fast for a beginner. They jump right in with full sentences spoken at near-full speed. There is little effort made to build on previous vocabulary, no grammar, no breaking down sentences into pieces, no review, just one sentence of random (to me) sounds after another.

I can't believe anyone can learn a language with this CD. Maybe, just maybe, if one listens to it 25-50 times, but there has got to be faster ways.

The phrases themselves are OK, not great. They cover the basics, but some are a bit suspect. "I'd like to buy a roll of film" can probably go.

This might be useful to someone with 1-2 semesters of Korean, to learn some good phrases. But everyone else, avoid.

The CD and book set are good for review but for learning Korean with prior exposure. If you new to learning Korean this is a difficult crash course. The lessons go by extremely fast and the sentences spoke by the native Korean speaker are not articulated for punctuation. You will spend time guessign and hoping that it sounds right (Not good if you need to interact). I used this as a reference to try to understand the language so I would know what some of the K-pop singers were saying. I learned a few words but you would have to listen to this CD for close to a month before you were able to learn the supposed language in an hour (disc is 68 minutes). Even more confusing was the inclusion of Chinese numbers with Korean (talk about difficult). Good concept, but fails in effectiveness. There are better and more effective ways to learn than this. I paid a penny for it. I would have been upset if I paid more than that. As a review it is concise and compact edition with some useful information for brushing up before landing.

Having studied some spoken and written Korean previously, I expected this to be a good tool for review and learning some more phrase structures. However, the format of the lessons, the clarity of the native speakers' pronunciation, and the limited written material are all very insufficient. One simply cannot just listen to this and be able to tell what they're actually saying, even in cases where one may have heard some of the words before. The words and phrases are only given once, so there is no chance to reinforce learning or disambiguate the sounds. I recommend the Living Language Korean "Complete course for Beginners", which comes with a small (but very good) book and a set of CD's. I'm surprised at the choices someone had to consciously make in producing this, and particularly by Living Language, whose "Ultimate" full course products I am very fond of and have used several times.

When I walked into the bookstore to buy an audio tape, I was sold over by the Living Language In-flights. They're perfectly painless and great for a quick and easy overview of the most useful expressions and vocabulary. I used it almost everyday for a month or two while driving and now I think that if I ever go to Korea, I'll actually be able to make myself be understood! It's a really good way to get started on learning a new language.