Customer Reviews

Modern Korean: An Intermediate Reader

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"Modern Korean: An Intermediate Reader" published: 2000, 327 pages + glossaries

Because the teaching of Korean to foreign speakers is still in its infancy, most of the available books and audio materials are designed for beginners. Beyond this stage, it can be difficult to find materials for intermediate students. Fortunately, "Modern Korean: an intermediate reader" bridges the gap in this area of Korean language pedagogy. Personally, having studied Korean for about 2 years, including a semester in Korea, I find this book to be at the level I needed. The readings include topics such as culture, customs, history, folk tales, and personal letters. They are followed by vocabulary lists and highlight new patterns in grammar. Additionally, the latter half of the book introduces "han-ja" (Chinese characters), which are helpful as they are still occassionally used in written Korean, particularly in newspaper headlines when the native Korean word would be longer, and also when abbreviating calendar dates. * * I would recommend this book to students who have had anywhere between a year and a half to two and a half years of Korean study. Although this book is comprehensive, study could also be supplemented by listening to Korean internet radio or other audio tapes, and reading light modern literature such as poems or short stories (although these can be hard to find). In sum, I find "Modern Korean" to be the ideal book for intermediate students of the Korean language.

If you already have a basic understanding of the Korean language, then this book is the next step. It has readings pertaining to the Korean culture, along with vocabulary and grammar studies. I had been waiting for a long time for a book like this. Too bad there aren't many good Korean books out there like this one.

A typical old style reader. There are a number of problems. The texts are not interesting. Even though the title is Modern Korean there is too much emphasis on things of little interest to me like Korean festivals, folk tales etc. I prefer authentic content about real people, or history or other adult material. I find the examples, drills and exercises useless.I need to read and listen. I want a good word list with the odd explanation and then more content. What I do need is an audio version of every chapter, either on CD or available for download on the Internet. Unfortunately this book is one of only two intermediate readers I have found. Both are about the same.

The book is entitled "Modern Korean," but the language style taught and used is not modern. It is mostly out of date, and not what you would hear in conversation at all.

I'm a little different from most students of Korean in that I have heard the language in my home for 25+ years. At times, I have had differing levels of fluency (more when I lived in Korea, less now that we've lived in the US for a long time). One of the biggest frustrations I have with every system of Korean I have tried to use to learn is an apparent lack of understanding of how English speaking minds work, and a good use of that understanding to teach how to construct the Korean sentences. There is always a big assumption that we will just understand when something is presented without an adequate explanation of why words and patterns are used the way they are. This book has the exact same shortcomings.

I understand much more Korean than I can speak. I was hoping with this book I would get better explanations for what I hear so that I can use the language much more. But I find the book lacking in that. What I do get are a lot of chuckles and and "We don't talk like that anymore," when I try to put it into practice. So perhaps for me, it gives me a conversation starter with people who can then teach me more modern versions of how the language is used, but with a name like "Modern Korean," I would have hoped that would not be the case.