Customer Reviews

Reference Grammar of Korean: A Complete Guide to the Grammar and History of the Korean Language

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

 

 

As other reviewers have noted, this is not a useful tool for beginning or (most) intermediate learners of Korean. However, if you are looking for an authoritative guide to modern Korean grammar, there is no English-language work that compares to Martin. The lack of hangul is regrettable, but common in technical linguistic publications, of which this is one.

I have searched long and hard for authoritative treatments of Korean grammar in both Korean and English. Not only does Martin's work have no peers in English, it has few peers even in Korean.

Again -- do not buy this book if you are looking for something that will help you learn Korean. Buy it only if you are looking to work on the Korean language that is the functional equivalent of Smyth for ancient Greek, or CGEL for modern English.

My copy of this book just arrived today, so I cannot review its contents thoroughly. However, I am able to register massive initial disappointment. Korean text is not written in hangul, but is romanized. This makes the text extraordinarily difficult to read and will result in the reader making a mental translation into the correct hangul form every time he reads a piece of Korean text in the book. Given the depth and scope of this book, nobody who cannot read hangul will ever use it. I cannot understand why the author should make things so difficult for the reader by romanizing the Korean text. Regardless of what other virtues the book might have (and judging from the contents I am convinced that it has many) I can only give it three stars because the Korean text is romanized.

...because I would have regretted buying this book. How can you discuss a language in such great depth without using its proper alphabet? With such an in-depth exploration into the language, it would be safe to assume that one who is interested in this book would already know how to read Hangeul. Latin characters in inadequate in expressing the Korean pronunciation.

This should be one of the most useful books in my entire language learning library, and it's not, and here's why: While this book covers every possible aspect of Korean that you could want, and is a thorough and accurate reference guide to the language, most of the book was written not in hangeul (Korean script) but rather was romanized. And not only was it romanized, but it was romanized using a system invented by the author rather than either of the two commonly used systems. This, for me, makes the book very nearly impossible to use as it's such a chore to look anything up. Sure, I could learn the system, but why should I have to? I should think anyone who's into Korean enough to want such a tome would have learned the Korean script long ago.

If another edition of this book using hangeul or, at the very least, an accepted system of romanization, comes out, then it will absolutely be worth buying. Until then, I'm afraid it's been more useful as a doorstop than for studying Korean, and I'm sorry I wasted my money on it.

and immediately returned it. After reading other commentators reviews and looking it over myself, I was dismayed. I live in South Korea, and the employee at the bookstore in Itaewon asked me why I'm returning it and saw it herself. She said she should have looked at it before selling it. She was amazed that there was no Hangul. How in the world can you not have its script included in the book? I don't care what any linguist says, it's necessary to the language, especially as it is a part of its history. I give this book two big thumbs down as it tricked me into purchasing a "complete" guide. I'm glad I was able to return this book immediately, and get my money back, but I'm saddened that such a big book didn't deliver as promised. I'm hopeful they read our reviews, and make a better edition.

As others have said, the content is thorough, however, the layout is awful, and the romanisation impenetrable for Korean students. This seems to be designed to be a field guide for a linguistics student.

I don't know much about linguistic texts, but it would seem that the hangeul is just as relevant to grammar as the phonetics, and having both hangeul and standardised phonetics would make this a much more broadly useful reference than it is.

If you want a grammar reference for self study, check out Korean Grammar for International Learners from Yonsei University and Using Korean: A Guide to Contemporary Usage

The previous review is quite correct about the lack of Hangul in this book. More Chinese characters would also be nice. It is, however, helpful to explore the Yale system used by Martin if you want to read certain kinds of linguistics articles on Korean.

This book is a huge repository of Korean grammar. As far as I have been able to deduce it is very thorough and has good appendixes. The main problem of this book is that it's not written in the Korean script, which turns out to be a big problem. It's apparently written in some romanization this guy "the author" made up. This makes this book completely useless to a practical learner of the Korean language. And it is in very bad taste if it is intended for serious scholars of the Korean language, since most of them would be using the Korean script or one of the three generally accepted romanizations for the language. I mean, the romanization doesn't even resemble IPA. To be honest, it doesn't even make sense and instead it ends up looking like Vietnamesea lot of the time. This guy must have some sort of ego problem if he thinks I'm going to learn his cryptic personal Latin alphabet for Korean just to read this book, because I know Tuttle Publishing is better than this.

Another problem that this book has is the layout within chapters. You'd think a complete guide to the grammar and history of a language would be bigger than the 1000 pages offered in this book, right? Well, you'd be right. It turns out that the layout within the book is atrocious and the grammatical information tends to be bunched up in haphazard blocks which really makes this book look more like a mad professor's undecipherable chicken-scratch personal notes rather than the polished textbook it purports to be.

Also, things are hard to find in this textbook. The glossary and the table of contents are neither intuitive or easy to read. From the segments I've read of this book, it's got a lot of valuable information, but to have any luck accessing most of it you have to read it like a novel - from beginning to end. I expected to easily find the exciting tidbits advertised on the cover and the description easily, but I just couldn't.

All-in-all, this book is a huge rip-off and a let-down. It turned out to be worthless to me because its several problems with presentation and layout make it illegible. I think it would actually take less time to be accepted to a Harvard PhD program in Korean linguistics, do the field research in Korea on the language, write a complete reference grammar to Korean, and start your own publishing company to surmount the fact that this book was so bad it gives Reference Grammars to the Korean language a bad name for life than to actually sort through this jumbled mess.

This book had heroic ambitions, but ultimately couldn't overcome its fatal flaws.

I haven't read the book. I scanned the index and realize, with the other two reviewers, that the writer missed the boat by not using Hangul and, where appropriate, Chinese characters. Who is it that will have the interest and background to digest what this book has to offer who does not also know Hangul at a minimum?! One reviewer points out that romanization is useful for some purposes. Then put the romanized in parentheses or footnotes if and when it makes sense to use it at all.