Intimidating but Effective, October 13, 2003

(By Edward Trimnell, author of "Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One," ISBN:1591133343)

There are some language texts that try to soften the blow with lots of pictures, simple activities, and cultural vignettes. This book is definitely NOT in that category. Elementary Korean is as dry and dense as a college Calculus textbook. It makes you jump directly into the most difficult aspects of the Korean language. Practically every page is a minor treatise on grammar. And Hangul is used throughout the text; the authors apparently feel that transliterations are for sissies.

The good news is that Elementary Korean teaches you what you really need to know in order to acquire a sound footing in basic Korean. The authors could have taken a few more pains to make the ride more entertaining; but they probably assumed that anyone who studies Korean knows that they are in for an uphill trek.

As one reader pointed out, the recordings on the CD are a little on the fast side. Nonetheless, they are helpful if you want to discipline yourself to comprehend Korean at the speed at which it is actually spoken.

If you buy this course (and I think that you should), it would probably be a good idea to also buy a course that holds your hand a bit more. Both the Teach Yourself Korean course from NTC Publishing and the Pimsleur Korean course would make good companions to this text.

nice book, October 30, 2000

Since I am looking mostly for reading/writing proficiency I find this to be a great book.

+ The grammar notes are clear and well illustrated.
+ The vocabulary is a lot but not completely overwhelming. The authors try to group closely related words physically close together to reduce the cost of learning new vocabulary.
+ Better than Myondo in presentation of material. Instead of spreading out related grammar material, it tries to present them together.
+ What I think is really great are the pronunciation rules ... you won't find this kind of practicality and detail in most other text. (Now, Myondo is very detailed but describing ssang-chiut as a voiceless alveo-palatal glottalized affricative isn't particularly helpful to me).
+ No Chinese characters are used in this book which is a plus at this level since Chinese characters rarely appear in the main text of popular Korean newspapers anyway
+ The authors actually provide a decent number of exercises with ANSWERS in the back! Now what they need to publish next is a supplementary reading and exercise book.

- I concur with a previous reviewer that the CD does not have enough basic sound examples.

One of the best, November 10, 2004

For those of you who have tried to study Korean using the books available in the marketplace you already understand there is a dearth of good learning materials. I think the reason why so many people give this book 5 stars is it is a relative value compared to other textbooks available.

Pros:
The grammar explanations of this book are fantastic as are the vocabulary building sections in the beginning of each chapter.

Cons:
As others have mentioned the dialogues on the CD are are difficult to comprehend for a beginning speaker. More exercises and examples would help to illustrate various uses of phrases and expressions.

I personally think a better series of books for the comprehensive study of Korean is the Integrated Korean series published by Hawaii University Press. The Integrated series stretches the language over a five-level, ten-volume series of books rather than trying to compact the entire language into two textbooks.

A great first book, September 22, 2004

I've just started studying Korean and this book, so I can't review it in depth. I mostly wanted to pass on some info to fellow Korean students. I will say that I was impressed enough to buy the 2nd volume which also includes a CD. Yes, the CD contains fast speech, but stick with it. You might only be able to repeat part of the phrase the first times through, but eventually you can catch up. Pronunciation is the first threshhold to cross whenever starting another language.

I live in the USA, but I ordered my copies from Amazon Canada. You might wish to look it up there yourself. As of this time they list a new edition coming out. I saved a few bucks and also ordered Assimil Coreen. If you can at least read French well, Assimil has a great course in Coreen (Korean) with tapes or CDs. (Check the Assimil site for ISBN numbers so you can order the version you prefer from Amazon--Amazon has all too brief descriptions, but does include ISBN). Also check out The Sounds of Korean: A Pronunciation Guide--another great CD/book combination with in depth pronunciation exercises.
For less than the cost of Pimsleur Comprehensive you can buy all 4 books. You would then have nearly 5 hours of recorded Korean instead of Pimsleur's 15 hours of WAY too much recorded English and repetitious bits of Korean. Plus, you would learn Hangul and have books full of info!

Elementary Korean is the best, June 15, 2004

After studying Korean (on my own using internet sources etc etc) I have decided that this book is definately by far one of the best books you can get for korean. It contains an incredible amount of information. Most courses are quite small for Korean and do not contain a great deal, or are hard to manage. I have looked at the Rosetta Stone series for Korean (costing $300) and this $50 book is by far better than that whole program. It is better than any books I have seen in book stores. I have done the Pimsleur course which is a little strange in my opinion. Pimsleur does help with pronunciation a little bit but some of the language structure is a bit weird and not natural for the Korean Language. I feel that ever since I bought this book a couple weeks ago (I am on lesson 6 out of 15 I believe) I am learning at a much faster pace than I ever was before.

1) The grammer in this is excellent. It contains many many grammer points for every chapter and introduces them in a nice order (meaning you get important stuff first unlike some other courses I have looked at where you have to wait till near the end of the course to really dig into some good grammer).
2) The vocabulary consists of a surplus of words that anyone could ever want to learn as they are starting Korean.

I admit, this course is really hard and does contain a lot of information right from the start and might be hard on someone who does not know anything about Korean, but if you have already begun looking into the Korean Language, I highly recommend this. I do not know how good of a job it does teaching hangul as I already knew most hangul when beginning this book, but I do know it covered some points and specific irregulars and pronunciation rules that I had not previously known so it probably is very good at hangul as well. Others have said to do the 2 hangul chapters first, which might be a good idea to someone who does not know it. It should be a pretty good book for teaching hangul but I am not entirely sure if it teaches well and easy to understand for someone who does not know hangul, but it seems to do a good job. The first two chapters on just basic sentences and sayings people should know were alright in my opinion. Chapter 1 is good because it deals with just simple things like yes, no, nice to meet you, thank you, etc...But honestly, the romanization confuses me very very much so I would learn hangul first (it has both romanization and hangul in the chapters 1 and 2 because they do not introduce hangul until chapter 3). The romanization has a chart for how to pronounce all the strange letters they use for romanization and all, and I honestly think hangul would be much easier to learn than learning romanization used in these two chapters. But if you know the hangul (which is covered in the book) then chapter 1 is very good. Chapter 2 covers basic information on what a teacher might say in the classroom or the students, which didnt do much for me as I am learning completely on my own. 3 and 4 is hangul. Chapter 5 is where this book finally really kicks in. Starting with Chapter 5 you have all your lists of vocabulary, your dialogues, and many explanations on grammer. Chapter 5 is where it gets intense.

People have mentioned the audio cd is not very good. I disagree. I think it is excellent. Even though it is just one 74 minute cd (seemed like it wouldnt last very long) it has most anything on the cd you would want being pronounced. It does not give you time to repeat after them or does not say words twice, but it fits a lot of words and spoken korean on the one cd. You can listen to it and figure out how the word should be said. The woman speaker speaks at a nice pace, while the male speaker is a little faster but still a nice pace in my opinion. Listening to the male speaker helps build your listening comprehension because when speaking with a real korean it will be just as hard if not harder to understand. The cd is excellent in my opinion.

Lastly, I want to mention the exercises. There are exercises at the ends of the chapters (mainly beginning with Chapter 5 when the real lessons begin) which I highly recommend you doing. Luckily I am highly interested in the Korean language and find it very fun to learn so I can make myself do them. Some may seem a bit dull or long or pointless at first but I know thats not the case. When it says figure out what this is in Korean and write out the WHOLE sentence for each one, I highly recommend doing that. It will greatly help, even if it is a lot of work. It has all the answers (or answers that work - for example if it says translate this sentence into Korean, it will give a correct translation, when there are a couple different ways to translate it. That is the only problem I have found so far. Sometimes its hard to check your answers if your working on your own and they only give one possible solution...but, they do cover an answer for every exercise in the book.).

Overall, I like everything about this book. It covers everything very well.

This is a great book, it is not the classical phrase book (although it gives you many phrases!), but is a combination of a grammar book with a small dictionary and a phrase book.

It is written in a clear way, it's easy to understand every lesson, and it helps you to build a vocabulary wide enough. Besides, the small dicctionary at the end of the book makes easy to search for many words. Contains exercises at the end of every lesson, with their answers.

The cd is a great tool for you to hear the pronunciation and how korean is actually spoken.

The only problem is romanization, it's a little complicated, but as soon as you learn hangeul (by the third lesson), you'll never have to worry about it.

The conclusion: If you wanna learn korean in an easy way, this book is an option.