Customer Reviews

Korean Through English, Book 1 (Book only)

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

 

 

The first volume takes a lot of time to carefully teach you how to read and write in Hangul using the cassettes for pronunciation. It also has a lot of useful vocabulary, common expressions and sentence structures including survival language. However, it is weak on grammar and the following volumes do nothing to remedy that problem. My recommendation is to start with volume 1 and then go on to a different series.

This book is pretty bad, I must say. It goes much to slowly over some things (they could've spent 2 or 3 lessons on the alphabet instead of 5, for example) and then super fast over important stuff. They will mention an important point of grammar once within a dense paragraph of information, and you have to go searching for it or you'll miss it completely. They don't provide enough practice examples, either.

The tapes also move too fast, without enough pause time for you to repeat; you will have to pause the tape after each phrase if you want time to finish it before the next phrase starts.

Overall, get a different book if you can. If I didn't have Korean co-workers and friends to help me with this, I would be completely confused by this book.

This is the first volume for beginners out of 3 volumes. I found it the most user-friendly Korean textbook I ever used to teach Korean to English speaking students. It starts with the very basic Korean alphabet. Then each unit has vocabulary, pronounciation, grammar and practice using new teaching methods. It is availabe with or without cassette tapes. I would recommend to get with cassettes which are excellent for students. This text was developed by Seou National University. I understand many American universities and colleges use this.

To learn a foreign language by yourself is not easy. In particular for people who want to learn Korean, they may have a hard time to find the right tools to start. There aren't many. Perhaps the hardest part for a beginner to learn any foreign language is not to get bored too easily at the very beginning. Still, Korean Through English does the job. It comes with 3 volumes, namely one to three. Each volume comes with a textbook and 3 cassette tapes. There are at least 20 chapters in each volume. The textbooks and the cassette sets can be purchased separately. The target student is a English speaker who has no prior knowledge in Korean. In each chapter, the host tells a story before providing two short dialogues presented by native Koreans. Right after each dialogue, the host wants the student to participate in the dialogue by repeating the same dialogue partially. Also, the host emphasizes some important or useful phases. All the dialogues can be found in the textbook. Brief introduction of Korean grammer is included in each chapter. By going through all the chapters, the student should be able to deal with various real life situations requiring Korean. However, though as a nice introduction, Korean Through English probably won't make you a native speaker in a short time. It takes much more time and effort to master a language. Still, one important purpose it serves nicely is to provide an easy and interesting approach for you to learn this foreign language. You won't get bored so easily.

The introduction into Hangul(the alphabet of Korean)is good. Really. The tapes provide good examples to follow. The drawbacks to this series are the extremely limited vocabulary. The vocabulary that the first book offers is not very useful, ie, a chapter on dry cleaners and one on buying gas. If you are a rank beginner and have no one to teach you the sounds of Hangul, go for it. But, I agree with the other reviewer, switch series after the first book.

I used many different textbooks to teach Korean and I found this book most user-friendly for English speaking students.
It starts with the very basic Korean Alphabet and grammar applying new teaching methods. Each lesson consists of Vocabulary, Pronounciation, Grammar and Practice. Accompanying audi-cassettes are very helpful and I found them the best among other audio recordings for lannuage textbooks. This textbook was developed by Seoul National University, the super prestige school in Korea.

A very good book if you want to learn Korean Language. There is a English translation, so it is easy to learn without have a dictionary.