Customer Reviews

Yes! You Can Learn Korean Language Structure in 40 Minutes

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

 

 

I was excited to receive this book. From the publishers description I thought that it would help me to understand Korean sentence structure. It didn't.

The author explains that this book grew from course notes. That is exactly how it reads - as notes for a course, that would be explained and illustrated by a lecturer. I think if this book were used with a teacher, who could explain and make the appropriate sounds, then it could be of some use. I think it is essentially useless for self-study.

The title is mainly a misnomer - you do not learn korean language structure with this book, it is an introduction to the Hangul alphabet (and there are much better introductions available). The final pages of the book do cover some very basic sentence structures.

The description of Hangul letters as depicting the movements of the tongue and mouth (which they are supposed to do), is very poor. Perhaps this could be made clear with photographs of mouth shapes, and good diagrams of tongue position, but none are provided. Alternatively, if a lecturer was teaching this, then the appropriate shapes and movements could be demonstrated (it did grow from lecture notes, and I guess this made sense when someone was standing in front of an audience). What is given here is poorly written and confusing.

This short book (117 pages) is printed in really large type on very small pages (to get it to be more than a few pages long?). It is not good value for money.

I would recommend you learn Hangul alphabet from "My first 100 words in Korean", and learn basic sentence structure from beginning language texts such as "Elementary Korean" by King and Yeong. Also, unless you are friends with Koreans, or living in Korea, you will definitely need a tape or CD of Koreans making the vowel and consonant sounds, in order to get them right. The correspondence to English sounds is not very close.

I won't lie, the title is misleading. That's why I only gave it 4 stars. On the other hand, the book is excellent if you understand what it will and will not do: The book WILL help you learn the Korean alphabet. The book will NOT help you do much else. ^_^ That's a bit of hyperbole but there's very little reading material here so you'll have to look elsewhere for that.

I would recommend this as a first step for a complete newbie to the Korean language. In my case, I checked the book out from the library, read it a couple of days on the treadmill, made some flashcards, and was done with the book. I wouldn't necessarily buy it unless you've got some money to burn or just like having an extensive library!

In fact, if you actually have Korean friends/relatives to help you out, you may just want to skip on over to the New Sogang Korean series. It's an import but a good place to start as a beginner. Good luck!

Yes, it is true. With this book you will learn to read and write Korean. It breaks down the language structure in a very logical and easy to understand way. It is also filled with useful phrases and other bits of information. I highly recommend this book (along with a good Korean-English dictionary) to anybody travelling on the Korean peninsula.

First the author points out in the introduction that the intention is not to learn to read and speak Korean - put rather to help recognize the consonats & vowels, which comes before the other or structure of charaters, and therefore the pronuciation, as an aid to your studies - and it does. I picked this book up at an Air Force base in Korea about 8 years ago and it is the gem that has helped me recognize the pronuciation of Korean characters where ever I go. The bigger print and different method was refreshing. While it gives some phrases and words to know on the last couple of pages - that is not the purpose of this book. The unique method will stick out as it uses the power of association by using Korean relationships. I lost this book (a blue cover then) in a recent move and was searching online for it to help my husband. He is trying to learn thru traditional methods (books, audio, repetition, recordings, etc) and having a hard time understanding the pronuciation that the audio wants of him and recognizing the characters or their sound. If your looking for grammer "meat" or something to build vocabulary then this book is not for you. If you are a beginner and want to be able to recognize the basic consonants, vowels, sounds, and have it stick using simple explanation and excersise, Or if the traditional methods are hurting your head, then pick this up. If your an intermediate reader or speaker - forget it, its a waste of time for you. Good book to pair with First 100 words in Korean.