Customer Reviews

Minjungs Pocket English Korean and Korean English Dictionary (English and Korean Edition)

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I bought this dictionary a couple of months ago, and I must say I'm very pleased.

At first I was a little dubious, because, judging by the measures, it seems too small. However it is not, it's a comprehensive dictionary. The font is small, so the size of the book is reduced.

This dictionary does NOT contain romanization, entries are written in korean. Besides it provides the hanja (chinese characters) of a word, so this is excellent. Virtually every word you can think of is listed here.

I also have the Langenscheidt's Pocket Dictionary, but this dictionary is beyond comparition.

This dictionary is exactly what a serious student of korean needs.

This two combined into one volume has Englsih-Korean and Korean-English dictionaries in one. Very handy format yet it is comprehensive enough to use for serious Korean language study.
Recommended for all Korean language students.

This is a Korean dictionary used in our Korean language class.
It is designed for college students who want to learn Korean and easy to carry around and stirdy flexible binding helps to keep many years. It is economic because it has English-Korean and Korean-English in one. It is also very comprehesive so that one can find all the entries for textbooks and conversations including many technical terms too. I would like to take it with me when I visit Korea. Recommended to all Korean language students.

I'm unable to review this specific edition - I have a very old copy printed in the 60's, I believe. I have found, however, that the Minjung dictionaries are by far the best.

I tend to use this when I'm trying to understand or translate text. I've found the Langenscheidt/Berlitz (not sure about the spelling) dictionary is much more helpful if I need to find the right word when speaking.

Note that if you're online, the dictionary on Yahoo's Korean site (yahoo.co.kr) uses the Minjungseorim content.

$56 seems a bit steep for this edition though.

I do not own this paper version of the dictionary, but it is included in my eletronic dictionary that I bought in Korea (not sure if Amazon sells them on here). It is a wonderful dictionary with an abundance of words, example sentences, and variations for the words. And, thank god, no Romanization! As other people have said, it can be a bit frustrating at times choosing the right definition, but this is where the electronic version is super helpful -- on most electronic dictionaries with Minjung (or any dictionary) included, you can highlight a word and jump to the reversed definition. This can be really helpful for words with more than one meaning.

It is true that this is designed for a Korean learning English (concider the publisher's market share), but it is not too much of a problem unless you are looking up a word without an one-to-one equalivant, in which case there is a description of the word in Korean instead of a single word.

One of the best korean dictionaries although it is
not cheap. But it is comprehensive and worth buying if you can afford it.