Choosing a Korean Text Book

Discussion in 'Specific Languages' started by Big_Dog, Oct 5, 2014.

  1. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    (What follows is more like a log entry, but I already have a Korean log, and I wanted to separate out a thread on textbooks. Feel free to suggest other books, especially if you have first hand experience with them. There are tons of Korean resources out there, and no lack of textbooks, so I don't intend the post below to be all inclusive.)


    I’m researching resources for Korean, which I plan on starting to learn next year. I first wanted to find a nice little booklet for learning Hangul. Even though there are lots of free resources for learning Hangul, I want to have a paper booklet too, which will help reinforce the script. I wasn’t really impressed with what was available on Amazon. Most systems for learning Hangul seemed to be part of something bigger, like a full text, and many of those had bad ratings. It was hard to get a handle on how good the various resources taught script. So I decided to focus on a text book first, and see if they included a good section on Hangul.

    So I did a search on Korean Textbooks, and checked out the most popular one. Korean for Beginners had tons of positive reviews, sounded new, trendy and fun. But then I read a couple of reviews that changed my mind. Here was the most useful one:

    So no exercises, poor and sporadic coverage of grammar and vocabulary…what were these guys thinking? There were lots of comments on this guys review, all essentially confirming what he said. One was from the author (well, we never really meant this to be a textbook) and one from an angry person (I don’t want a serious textbook) and several people praising him. I read a couple other negative reviews that were more of the same. Another thing that really annoyed me about this is the author going all Benny-Lewis on the negative reviewers. Up until a certain date he hunted down every negative review and even slightly negative comment and (unlike Benny, very politely) told them why they were wrong. Seems pretty unprofessional for a serious author. Since then they have released a second book and an exercise book, but I feel that would still leave me with a disorganized introduction to the language.

    Next I checked out Elementary Korean, which is recommended by the review above. There is a second book and an exercise book, but it sounds like this one is fairly self-contained. Again, lots of positive reviews. The negative reviews were mostly people complaining about it being difficult or dry. There was one really popular negative review which spent a lot of time pointing out a fairly insignificant pronunciation explanation mistake. None of what I read bothered me. Looks like a solid text, but I didn’t really get a warm fuzzy regarding Hangul, so I decided to read reviews for all the big textbooks on Amazon to see what was available.

    Integrated Korean is huge. 4 books, workbooks, etc. It’s designed to be used in a classroom, which can sometimes be problematic for a self-learner. Answers for lessons and audio don’t get mailed with the book, but are evidentially available online for free. There’s enough negative stuff there to make me avoid this book.

    Intermediate College Korean was said by one reviewer to be more logical than Elementary Korean, but I wasn’t impressed by the reviews. It’s a dated and doesn’t have answers to exercises.

    Speaking Korean, which someone said was better that College Korean, is a dated 3 book series. Again, I wasn’t impressed by the reviews.

    Korean Made Simple looks like a good book, but it’s hard to figure out how it compares to others from the reviews, probably because it's so new. Evidently the book has no index. There is no audio, but I guess the author has a Youtube channel that takes care of the audio needs. I watched a little of it and thought it was ok, but maybe not quite as nice as some of the other free Korean Youtube channels. The biggest drawback is the fact that it’s a 2 book series, and the 2nd book isn’t out yet. Sounds like the first book really only covers half of what you need. I know that sounds obvious, but I bring it up because lots of textbooks try to give you all the high usage stuff in a first volume, then offer a second volume for lower usage. From the reviews, I get the impression that this one is half of the high usage stuff. By the time I’m ready to use a textbook, if the 2nd book is out and there are some reviews from advanced learners comparing it favorably with other textbooks, I might still buy it. We shall see.

    I wanted this story to have a happy ending, so I saved my favorite book for last. Living Languages Korean is a relatively new “book”, and includes 3 coursebooks, 9 audio CDs and a Hangul guide. Again, probably because it’s new, there are no comparisons with other texts. There were several positive comments about the Hangul guide, which appears to be exactly what I’m looking for. So since it was only about $30, I decided to go ahead and buy it. Looks great on my shelf! I’m pretty confident the Hangul guide is fine, but I’m not expecting the coursebooks to be enough grammar. I’m hoping they’ll be a good, quick introduction to basic grammar, and be a good preparation for Elementary Korean or something more substantial down the road. I prefer to study using several different sources anyway, so this feels like a good path.
  2. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Although as I have said I am not interested in having a linguistic root canal via Korean :), I am a text book junkie and I feel, an advanced user of Amazon reviews. The problem with so many Amazon reviews about language learning products aimed at beginners, is that it is beginners who are mostly reviewing the material, and who don't yet know what they don't know. You seem to have made a good survey of available intro courses and textbooks, and I was interested in LL Korean since I like LL products, at least the older ones. Korean is one of their newer ones and I would expect it suffer in comparison with an older course if there were one. But 9 CDs of audio, assuming it is all audio and not DVD video, is quite a lot, even if it teaches a limited vocabulary. I too probably would have bought it.

    While looking at the LL book I saw Korean From Zero! 1. Although it teaches a very limited vocabulary like Pimsleur, it seems to be getting rave, even gushing reviews. Despite the drawback of beginner reviews I mentioned above, it seems to have something going for it. The same folks apparently also make a Japanese From Zero! series, so I would expect them to extend this Korean series as well. One disadvantage might be that only one native speaker is involved, and I prefer to have a mix of both male and female speakers, which seems especially important for Korean given that some of the listening comprehension difficulties I have read about regarding Korean have to do with differences between male and female speech, and obviously because spoken forms can vary by the gender of the person speaking or being spoken to. I would probably buy this as well.

    If tempted again by Korean, I would probably do multiple beginning courses in parallel, and especially wish to have a mix of politeness levels among the courses.


    Edit to add: After writing the above I was reading HTLAL and came across a review of LL products. Scroll down to find Chung's review of the Korean one. He also mentions using Korean From Zero!
    Last edited: Oct 6, 2014
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  3. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Thanks for showing me this. It has great reviews, but most of the comments aren't very useful, as usual. The biggest pluses seem to be good handling of Hangul, no romanization, and general layout of the book. The only really big minus for me - it's the first of a 4 book series, 3 of which aren't out yet (based on one person's comments). I still might consider getting it though.
  4. Chung

    Chung New Member

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    You can also download Korean from Zero 1 for free from the authors' website. The biggest downside for me is that the audio is split too finely. Many of the tracks lack useful metadata and last only a second or two by being just a recording of someone reading a word in the chapters' vocabulary lists. Otherwise it's not that bad of a resource.
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  5. Nobody

    Nobody Member

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    I used the Integrated Korean series. It was reasonably effective. Decent audio, good reading, reasonably good pacing on grammar point integration. No need for the workbooks, they're largely superfluous, and I didn't run into any problems using the texts outside of a classroom environment. I didn't use any other textbooks, so I can't speak in relative terms, but the series itself was adequate, reliable, and comfortable to use. I also used the Hanja primer published by the same organization to introduce me to Korean mixed script.
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  6. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Thanks - I'll check it out.
    Can you give me a little more detail on this quote of yours from HTLAL?
    Are you saying that LL doesn't introduce grammar systematically?
  7. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    I may need to give that a try. Thanks!
  8. Chung

    Chung New Member

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    The LL course for Korean is set up a bit strangely for me even though in it's also a bit like the typical course from "Colloquial..." or "TY..." these days with each unit focused on some theme (e.g. family, entertainment, ordering at a restaurant, numbers).

    In the textbooks of the Korean course, every unit is subdivided into 3 parts. Part 1 consists of a vocabulary list, exercises for that vocabulary and short notes on grammar. Part 2 is like part 1 but has also a section with translation exercises for the material taught up to that point in that unit. Part 3 contains a dialogue or narrative, another set of translation exercises tied to the content of that dialogue or narrative and then a small set of exercises involving the unit's vocabulary. In each part, the author adds extra information about the structures or vocabulary introduced under the heading "Take It Further" but this appears whenever the author believed it was necessary to add such information after a dialogue, vocabulary list or set of exercises - i.e. it turns up randomly. At the middle and end of the book there is a quiz for review, while there's an extra set of dialogues at the end of the book that incorporates most of the elements taught to that point.

    I prefer getting the dialogue/narrative first, the notes on relevant new grammar and vocabulary second, and then exercises pertaining to that content at the end. I can deal with this even when this sequence repeats a couple of times in a chapter (e.g. Dialogue 1, Notes 1, Exercises 1; Dialogue 2, Notes 2, Exercises 2, etc.). I don't find it effective to get all of the words and phrases first and practice using them in isolation before seeing them in context as is done in LL's course.
  9. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    I see - sorry for not checking the book first myself :oops:
    I agree with your preferred order - dialogue first. They seem to change their structure too (I compared the first book to the third). It doesn't look terrible, but it's not optimal either.
    Last edited: Oct 7, 2014

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