Customer Reviews

Intermediate College Korean

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

 

 

This book is excellent. It really works. If you're a beginner, then get the "College Korean" book by the same authors and work through it first. This book complements it nicely. If you are already somewhat competent in Korean, then this book is all you need. What I recommend is to copy out the dialogues, all the vocabulary, every example and all the grammar lessons in han-geul, rather than just reading them. (Don't copy the English of course! Just the Han-geul!) This makes you much quicker at learning and retaining them, and also makes you an expert speller and quick at writing. Then, do the exercises too, copying out the questions first. The dialogues cover the whole spectrum of Korean life, so they are excellent for your cultural education, above and beyond linguistic. This textbook weaves cultural and language learning together so you kill two birds with one stone, and at the same time makes it doubly interesting to study with! It cleverly chooses the most important aspects of Korean culture, so that you aren't caught off-guard or clueless about any major part of what is unique about Korean life. I can't believe how quickly my Korean is improving. Unbelievable! I am very thankful for this book! To give you an idea of how effective and absolutely brilliant this textbook is, after chapter 4 I was freely and naturally exchanging detailed emails with Korean friends, and at chapter 6 I was having long and entertaining conversations with Korean friends face to face! I should point out that I am not Korean (I'm of English-Canadian and Ukrainian-Canadian stock) and, beyond the basic, survival-level Korean, this is the only study book I have used. So, I'm living proof it's tremendously and remarkably effective! Going from mute to fluent in a month totally freaked out my Korean friends! I'm very happy with this book! By the way, this text goes beyond just an "intermediate" level. It basically takes you all the way from the end of beginner/survival level, all the way to the advanced level, which means you can talk to anyone, and are pretty handy with websites, books and magazines. Stupendous! The authors and editors are way too humble in their very modest claims of "improved fluency" et cetera. We're talking about a night and day difference between beginning and end, from being unable to really talk at all to becoming the life of the party. Amazing!

Having worked through College Korean, this was the perfect continuation, providing review of patterns with an expansion of vocabulary. Book would have been considerably enhanced by the inclusion of an answer key for those of us doing self-study.

I learned Korean in the Peace Corps many years ago, but have forgotten much. This book is ideal for recapturing much of the vocab that has escaped me over the years.

If you already know a lot of Korean, this is is a good textbook. The stories that begin each chapter follow the adventures of Hyun-bae, a US-raised Korean traveling to Korea on summer vacation to perfect his Korean skills. I really liked the first story, with him being so polite to the mother of the crying baby on the plane and the middle-aged man distracting him by asking about his studies.

The grammar explanations are clear, with plenty of examples. Pronunciations of words like chak-ha-da = cha-ka-da are given in Hangul. Some of the grammar exercises were just too hard for me to figrue out, which is the only reason I don't give it another star.

You can find additional materials (audio for the dialogues) for this book on their website - [...]

I'll update this review as I go through.