Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Even at 5 bucks, not worth it!, November 21, 1999
Okay, this book is really quite worthless. First, it is romanized. This is a terrible way to learn a non-roman script language. Second, my biggest complaint, it is out-dated. Since the book is from the 50's, yes, the 1950's, the younger generation in Korea can't understand you. Thirdly, the book does not teach all three levels of speech. Okay, there are other books out there. Don't buy this one... .
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Try not to be too critical . . ., April 7, 2007
I understand the previous reviewer's attitude towards this little book. The author, Samuel Martin, includes Hangeul only right at the end of the book, which really isn't helpful. But books for learning Korean generally have drawbacks - your challenge to overcoming these is persistence and, in this case, perhaps, a dictionary, which you must have in any case? With only a few characters, unlike Chinese which has thousands, Korean should not be all that difficult.
Let me suggest, then, that far from being useless, this book has simply left the learner with his/her work cut out. Remember that it was written at the height of 1950s anti-Communist paranoia and intended primarily for the likes of American servicemen who would have a limited tour of duty there and in fact, remains useful. It contains a lot of grammar and examples which would put a lot of later texts to shame - I know them because I have most of them, here in Korea!
My suggestion: don't scorn older textbooks because they are usually of better quality than whatever came afterwards. If the fact that the book is written exclusively in Romanised script irritates you, may I suggest that you use this as a good and practical excuse for practising writing in Korean? Look the parts up in a Korean dictionary and grammar textbook and write it out; it's always helpful. Or if you can already speak Korean, why not write to Tuttle and offer to rewrite it with examples in Korean and Roman?
For a book that's over fifty years old, this is actually excellent. I myself deplore the fact that it has almost no Hangeul, but that does not make it fully useless. The usefulness of any information you encounter in this life depends on how you view it. I am looking at some pages from this book as I sit here writing and I can visualise much of how it would be written in Hangeul.
Conclusion. Very useful, but you must look at it in the right way.
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by Joan V. Underwood
