16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
This is a dictionary for the native Korean learning English, May 6, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Minjungs Pocket English Korean and Korean English Dictionary (English and Korean Edition) (Hardcover)
I ordered this from a recommendation that it was one of the best EK/KE dictionaries. Yes, good for a Korean student in an ESL class. Not geared for beginners in the Korean language unless you are in an intermediate-advanced Korean class. The table of contents, introduction, appendices, and support tables are all in hangul. Also, amazon.com says this book has a hardcover when in fact it is paperback with a rubberized cover.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
not for a beginner in Korean, April 24, 2005
This review is from: Minjungs Pocket English Korean and Korean English Dictionary (English and Korean Edition) (Hardcover)
At first glance this appears to be an excellent dictionary for a student of Korean. It was the one recommended for my University course in Korean. I have now been learning Korean for two years, and I still don't find this dictionary very helpful (but my Korean teacher does!).
I think the main problem with the dictionary is that it is too comprehensive! Thus, when you look up a word, you may find five or six different meanings, which are not clearly differentiated in English (they may be in Korean). Similarly, attempting to use this dictionary to translate from English into Korean, one is faced with 6 possible verbs, when one would do, and with no indication of which would be the most usual.
My recommendation would be to find a less comprehensive dictionary until you reach a pretty high level of Korean.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Slow for use by beginners but good, October 13, 2006
This review is from: Minjungs Pocket English Korean and Korean English Dictionary (English and Korean Edition) (Hardcover)
I agree with the 2 reviewers that this dictionary is difficult for English speakers beginning to learn Korean.
For starters, the explanation of the marks used in the book are in Korean. Also, I found myself with a couple different choices with no example sentence fragments of use too often. For example, the noun "paint" has four words listed under (1), and three words listed under (2). ??? I'm always puzzled by which to choose.
However, the Korean-English section is a lot friendlier. In the English-Korean section, one could just pick any of the words or phrases, and then look it up in the Korean-English section. Doing this for just the (1) entries for "paint", I learned that :
1) the first entry was paints, or colors;
2) the second was "paint" spelled with the hangul
3) the third was more of a coating, lacquer
I'm not proficient with the hangul and that took me a some time to find. Many of you are certainly far better and this would not be as much of a chore. But it seems that the either of the first 2 entries would've have sufficed. So maybe that's a rule of thumb to use. It has been my experience that if a loadword exists (especially for common simple things), then it is used frequently, even if the language has its own word for the same thing. These two ideas boost the rating up from 3 to 4.
The physical qualities of the book are very attractive. The color, the box, the size, the print quality, the finess of the paper, the clarity of the letters, the paper book cover, and the real cover which is a deep blue, and soft like suede or something with gold print. I look at this book and want to use it just because of the asthetics.
As a last cool little thing is the the Chinese characters assoctiated with some of the Korean words. But these are traditional Chinese characters which in many of the cases I've seen have been changed (slightly or drastically) in Japanese (and of course Simplified Chinese characters).
Beginners (like me) are just slow, and cannot avoid the growing pains of learning a language. I'm not crazy about it, but it's certainly not the dictionary's fault. It's just fine. I would've liked to see the mark explanations in English as well though. My rating tops out at 4.
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