Customer Reviews

Korean/English, English/Korean Dictionary (Language Dictionaries Series)

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I am not at all satisfied with this dictionary. Since this book was published in New York, I figured it would be geared toward English speakers. I was wrong.

The first giveaway that this dictionary is not for English speakers is the Appendix. There is a mini-phrasebook for the Korean speaking tourist. Phrases in German and French are transliterated into hangeul.

The second strike against this dictionary is the incredibly short Korean-English half of the dictionary. There are many words that I have not been able to find here that I've found in my Dong-A dictionary.

I currently live and teach in Seoul, South Korea. I was able to pick up a better (and huge) two-way dictionary over here that I use at home, and I've been using Mladen's dictionary in the classroom. My students are also greatly displeased with this dictionary. They often look up words in the Korean-English half and end up telling me "it's not there." I've concluded, then, that this book is not even helpful for Korean speakers - unless they're traveling to Germany or France. If you're coming to Korea, wait till you get here to buy a two-way dictionary.

The reason I chose this dictionary is that it was the ONLY one I could find in which the Korean words in the Korean-English section were actually written in Korean, and not in romanized "Korean". If you're going to Korea, you'll need to be able to look up Korean words; the romanization will do you little good if a Korean is speaking to you. You'll do best to hand him/her a piece of paper and ask him/her to write the word; but then a romanized dictionary will be useless. If you want to go to Korea without learning their alphabet, good luck; you'll need it. If you take the trouble to learn the alphabet (it's not hard), then you won't need the romanizations. If you're looking at a sign that's in Korean, what on earth do you want the romanization for; you need to look the word up.

That being said, the problem with this dictionary is that it's sorely lacking in words. It happens too often that when I want find out what a Korean word means, it's not in this book. The English-Korean section is a bit better, but not much.

This is by far the worst Korean/English or English/Korean dictionary I have ever used. There are gaping and inexplicable holes in coverage, the definitions are often imprecise, and it includes a number rather objectionable English words (darky?!). Avoid at all costs.

Well, what can I say, It's a translation dictionary! I haven't NOT been able to find anything I wanted to as of yet and it's easy to look it all up. Some of the pronunciations I have trouble with but I have trouble with those in an english dictionary. Good Price, Good Value, Good Book.

I started to learn Korean almost a year ago. If you are reading this, you are probably looking for a good Korean dictionary where you can find any common word you come across during your studies. I was trying to use this dictionary to look for those words from the coursebooks I was also using to learn Korean at the same time. I realized that I couldn't find almost none of the words I wanted to. Now, this dictionary in particular, will not help you at all for many reasons:

- The ugly and unfriendly format (cover and pages) just doesn't make you feel like "opening it".
- It doesn't give any contextualized example about how to use certain words; ambiguity is what you are going to see most of the time.
- The probabilities to find a word from Korean to English is really low... that's why I think it is really useless (at least for me)


My theory is: It was not originally intended to be used by an English speaker, but rather a Korean traveller. You just have to compare the English to Korean section and Korean to English section. A weird fact was somem type of special section for travellers given in Korean with some phrases contrasted Korean vs English like "booking and reconfirming a flight", "Aboard the plane"... which was quite interesting... maybe even more than the dictionary itself. Then you could find some other expressions... from Korean to Japanese, French and German.

In brief, DON'T buy this item if you have money to get a better one. Take a look at some other ones and make sure there are some preview about their content to make your decision.

I bought this dictionary thinking that it would be useful. It wasn't. This dictionary is aimed at Americans who are already fluent in Korean and may need to use this only to look up an occasional word. If you are a beginner, spend the extra money and invest in better dictionaries.