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What’s the best Korean self-study book? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| JordanB8m Newbie Hong Kong Joined 4718 days ago 23 posts - 27 votes | Message 1 of 14 08 June 2011 at 8:07am | IP Logged |
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I can read Korean, and that is pretty much it. I want to eventually be fluent in Korean.
What's the best Korean self-study book to get? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6026 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 2 of 14 08 June 2011 at 1:01pm | IP Logged |
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Sadly, I haven't found a good self study book for Korean which may be why I abandoned my study of Korean.
Your options are: FSI Korean : Extremely formal and somewhat outdated but very comprehensive; your best bet for fluency. Very dry recordings with a really annoying speaker voice. TY Korean: For me it just seemed to try to do too much in a small amount of space. Not enough audio for me. Check out Moses McCormick's youtube posts ( Laoshu 5050) He had much better luck with it. Living Language SW Korean: I have not tried this but I have heard very good things about it. It is a nice bridge between TY and FSI Pimsleur: Great if you want to be relieved of $350 bucks and pick up 100 vocabulary words by the end! If you can read French, pick up Assimil Le Coreen sans Peine - It will give you the most bang for your buck! If you find a good course let me know!! edit: The BEST way to learn is to use any of the above to get a baseline vocab of, say 1000 words, and then talk to as many Korean speakers as possible. You will learn faster this way than you will with any self-study course! Edited by liddytime on 08 June 2011 at 3:12pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| aerielle Newbie Korea, South korea.calliston Joined 5129 days ago 36 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean | Message 3 of 14 08 June 2011 at 4:26pm | IP Logged |
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The Integrated Korean series is great. The only problem with it is that it doesn't have
answers to the questions asked after each chapter. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sanghee Groupie United States Joined 4865 days ago 60 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Korean | Message 4 of 14 08 June 2011 at 5:45pm | IP Logged |
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I can't say what's the best, but I really like the Yonsei Korean series if it's used with at least the workbook [though I also have the reading textbook which covers the same material as the main textbook and workbook] since the main textbook doesn't have any answers. However, I had already been studying Korean for a little while before I bought the textbook and I don't know how easy it'd be to start from essentially no knowledge besides being able to read Hangul. For the main Yonsei Korean textbook, the setup for each section is you have some kind of dialogue, then you are introduced to the word via pictures on the next page [also, side notes and footnotes give direction translation to English of some words they don't think you'll know]. Then it gives you some activities to do, and then it provides a translation for the dialogue and explains the 2-3 grammar points introduces in the section. The workbook has the same kind of activities as the textbook except it has more of them and gives the answers. The reading books have a small paragraph at the beginning of each section and the following page lists the new vocab with English, Japanese, and Chinese translations. Then it asks questions about what you just read (things like "Who was the story about?" "What did he want to buy for his girlfriend?") and the answers are in the back. For all of these, the dialogues/texts have audio and some of the activities have audio. So, I can't say that it's the best series, but I thought I'd throw it out there because I like it. :) Edited by Sanghee on 08 June 2011 at 5:53pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5332 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 5 of 14 08 June 2011 at 9:34pm | IP Logged |
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Personally I rather like the Survival Korean series (by Stephen Revere) as beginner material for Korean. I've also heard good things about the Integrated and Yonsei series, but I've never used either of them personally.
Another option are the textbooks from Monash University which they kindly provide on their website for free: http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/korean/klec/textbooks.php Some of their descriptions of the usage conditions of the -씨 honorific marker seemed a bit odd to me, but otherwise it looks like a well-written textbook as far as I can see. If you would prefer to learn Korean via Chinese (since I see you are in Hong Kong), I've seen Shanna mention a few Chinese-language Korean resources on her blog that may be useful to you: http://hangukdrama.wordpress.com/ 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| pigsonfire Newbie United States Joined 4872 days ago 26 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Cantonese | Message 6 of 14 20 June 2011 at 2:53am | IP Logged |
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Pimsleur is great for pronunciation, but you won't learn much vocabulary from it. Maybe 500 words for both levels.
I am using this in combination with FSI right now and it seems to be working fairly well. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Po-ru Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5277 days ago 173 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, Mandarin, French | Message 7 of 14 20 June 2011 at 5:12am | IP Logged |
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I have been quite dissappointed in the lack of thorough Korean materials. Honestly, I
didn't find TYS very helpful. FSI is a GREAT source because the material is so thorough. Though I wish they used more Hangul and not romanized Korean. College Korean is also a pretty good book, but I am not sure if there's audio with it. Also Dr.Arguelle's book "An Integrated Approach to the Korean Language" does come with tapes and is pretty thorough as well, though it is not necessarily aimed at improving your colloquial speech quickly. One book I highly recommend, I found in Korea. Called "Korean For Foreigners" by GANADA 가나다, I started using this book at the second level and it is pretty good for me and the Intermediate level. There are dialogues about 4 lines long then drills that review the grammar later on. Other than that, I have found good Korean material pretty hard to come by. LINGQ is also a good resource. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5212 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 8 of 14 20 June 2011 at 6:53am | IP Logged |
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Frankly, YouTube is the best place to learn Hangul in conjunction with its pronunciation.
There are MANY excellent YouTube channels to learn Korean Hangul and pronunciation. After that, I'd go with "Basic Korean: A Grammar and Workbook". 1 person has voted this message useful |
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