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What’s the best Korean self-study book? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6231 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 9 of 14 20 June 2011 at 12:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Has anybody used this course?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804841004 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4694 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 10 of 14 21 January 2012 at 2:25am | IP Logged | ||
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I haven't read through all of this thread but in my experience I would recommend getting "Korean Grammar for International Learners" both the textbook and the workbook. This has nearly all the grammar you need. If you study a less comprehensive book, you will find gaps in your knowledge later on and words that you don't recognize and don't appear in the dictionary.
You can start off with an easier book, "Korean Grammar in Use" which is an intermediate level book, but it does leave out a lot of grammar. It probably contains about 10% of the grammar you will come across in totality. But the exercises in that book are easy and the vocabulary is simple so it's a good way of easing into the study of Korean. It is quite good at explaining spelling rules for verb conjugation and it has many examples of conjugated verbs. But just keep in mind you will need a more advanced grammar text further down the line, and in my opinion, "Korean Grammar for International Learners" cannot be beat. I haven't seen Prof. Arguelle's book though. It is very daunting at first when you study it - it seemed like climbing Mt Everest to me - but after the second time going through it, you will find it much easier to understand. Make sure you have a good dictionary. I found the Android dictionary that came on my Galaxy Player - I am in Korea and they automatically put this dictionary on the operating system of your smart phones and players - to be excellent. I was using Google translate before this for several months and found this to be a very bad way of looking words up. The dictionary on the player is far far superior. It contains commonly used expressions and collocations as well as the definition of the word. I think I spent about 80% of the time looking up words when I first studied the text book. After I had all the definitions down though, understanding the sentences and the way Korean grammar is used became much much easier. So half the battle of understanding grammar is knowing the meaning of the words in the example sentences. I wish the authors had published a separate booklet with all the difficult words defined because that would have made life a lot easier. Some words I had to spend lots of time looking up because I didn't know the roots or they were in the body of the definition and not the word that appeared as the main word. For example, "마음 먹다". I did not know what this meant. To me it looked like "eating feelings" which didn't make sense. But after I looked up "마음" and went through the explanation under the word, I found "마음 먹다" and found that it meant "I have made up my mind [to do something]". It has been a struggle studying this book on my own, but after the fourth time reading through it, I feel I am getting a handle on Korean grammar. Then after you've studied this book, you can concentrate on learning vocabulary, speaking or whatever. You will have grammar under your belt. Warning about this book. In the Workbook, I found many mistakes by the authors. In the answer section, they have put in answers to questions that obviously came from elsewhere, maybe from a previous draft of the workbook? The answers have no relation at all to the question so clearly these answers are mistakes. So simple children's vocab book that teaches you the most elementary 600 words to start off with, I chose "Magic book", a book that is for Korean children. It has a nice list of commonly used words and some fun exercises to complete. Then "Korean Grammar in Use", an intermediate level grammar book. Then "Korean Grammar for International Learners". And you will be all set. I plan to go through "Using Korean" because some of the chapters has useful stuff that the International Learners doesn't go into depth as much, like Numbers. But I will pick and choose what sections to go through. For the grammar especially conjugations and particles, International Learners can't be beat. I found Using Korean very poor in the Conjugations section. If you want to learn just speaking and don't care about reading and writing there are many good books with CDs out there nowadays. I don't really care about basic conversation right now and headed straight for the grammar (and vocabulary) when I started studying. I do have many of these conversation books and CDs in my library so when I learn speaking, I will go through these books and CDs. I am probably learning like Korean students typically learn English, studying grammar and long lists of English words ... however, I plan to go beyond this, and do a lot of speaking practise later on, listening to mp3 files and CDs and even conversing with Koreans live. I feel that Korean students neglect this area when they study English, probably because they don't need to study this to get good scores in their uni entrance exams, and as a result many of them feel poor at communication after they finish high school, and attend academies as adults to learn English conversation. So I think this method of learning is OK, that is, concentrating on grammar and vocabulary learning, so long as one realizes you have to do all the speaking practise as well, if you want to be anywhere near fluent in the target language. Maybe the order of learning is not the best, but for me it suits my learning style and my circumstances, so I am sticking to this order (that is, learning grammar and vocab first from books and after that learning speaking from listening to native speakers and recordings). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tarko Senior Member Korea, South Joined 4693 days ago 119 posts - 148 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, French | Message 11 of 14 21 January 2012 at 11:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been using the Sogang textbook series. While it is very much focused on improving
speaking skills - which makes it good for a classroom setting - I am finding that it's great for self-study as well. It has three books: the student book which contains exercises, dialogues, and brief interesting stories; a workbook with many exercises (2- 5 pages depending on the importance of the grammatical point); and, most importantly, the grammar book. The grammar book explains the grammar, gives many examples, and provides a glossary for the student/workbooks. If you do all of the examples provided you'll be spending something like 100+ hours per book, and there are 10 books in the series. I highly recommend it. I also tried the Integrated Korean series but I didn't really like it. There were no audio examples, I found the layout of the book confusing, and it was just kind of boring. However Beginning 1 and Sogang 1A introduce the same exact information, so I assume they are equally good. TalkToMeInKorean.com is a fantastic resource, if you haven't discovered it yet. Maybe a little too much English in their videos but their grammar PDFs are very good. Levels 1/2/3 are the equivalent of Sogang 1A/1B/2A (first three semesters of university Korean). I'm also doing Pimsleur but I'm not crazy about it. They teach you that the object particle 를 is part of the word for "English" (영어). Um, no. I don't think it's a good introductory course. However I'm using it in the intermediate level and it's helping my response time and solidifying the elementary phrases in my head. If you do Pimsleur as a review for an introductory course it could be very beneficial. If you don't know that the word for "two" is 둘 and not 두 then you probably shouldn't do it. (Your mileage may vary.) Hope this helps! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chris Heptaglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7123 days ago 287 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Indonesian, French, Malay, Japanese, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Korean, Mongolian | Message 12 of 14 22 January 2012 at 10:03am | IP Logged | ||
A bit late, I know, but I have this book. It isn't a stand alone course or anything. It's more like a supplement that offers information on various quirks of Korean language and culture. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6439 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 13 of 14 02 February 2012 at 2:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Bad
- Teach Yourself Korean - Colloquial Korean - FSI Korean (also known as Baron's Mastering Korean: Hear it, Speak it, Write it, Read it) Alright - College Korean Good (relative to what else is on the market) - Integrated Korean - Elementary Korean - Pimsleur Korean (make sure you get the new one. They released a Korean series in the late 90's that was totally different and was super formal or something and didn't sound like any Korean I've ever heard on TV or in real life). I know the hate Pimsleur gets on this forum. If you like Pimsleur, go for it. If not, don't. I think it's good because it gets your brain used to thinking in the target language. NOTE: As myself and others have pointed out in various threads, it is extremely difficult to understand spoken words in Korean sometimes. Half of the words on the Korean Pimsleur program will sound different than they actually are. Then you'll hear them later and they sound different again. "Mot" (cannot do something) sounds like the English word "boat" half the time. "Nal-ssi" (weather) sounds like "dal-si" half the time. This is a problem you will encounter constantly in real life, too. It makes looking up words you just heard very difficult because you have no idea how to spell them, and that doesn't even address the fact that Korean words are slurred so much that even if you hear it correctly, that's probably not how it's spelled anyway. There is a .pdf transcript of Pimsleur Korean 1 floating around this forum somewhere. It may be helpful. Unlike with Japanese where there is no question on how to pronounce or spell a word you just learned, with Korean it's always a grey area. Books I would like to read - Stephen Revere's books. He gets my respect as an American who learned Korean to fluency and I would like to see what his books are like. Hopefully he wrote them and didn't just put his name on them. There are a few more I'd like to read but their names escape me at the moment. Edited by IronFist on 02 February 2012 at 2:25am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5537 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 14 of 14 02 February 2012 at 4:44am | IP Logged | ||
I have both of his Survival Korean books and the writing definitely seems to match his style of speech (based on watching him on Let's Speak Korean) so I'm pretty sure he did write them. (NOTE: Survival Korean *Vocabulary*, which I also own and have found quite useful, was not written by Stephen Revere. Survival Korean and Survival Korean Basic Grammar were.) --- To add to the thread topic: Once you find yourself leaving "Beginner" territory, I highly recommend "Using Korean" (link). This book cleared up a lot for me when I read through it and I still plan to make additional passes later as some of it was obviously still beyond my current level at the time, so it didn't really sink in on the first pass. There were several topics I thought I knew fairly well until I read the associated sections in Using Korean, which proved otherwise. Edited by Warp3 on 02 February 2012 at 4:50am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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