One feature I like is that each vocabularyy item is coded with an A, B, C. words tagged with an A belong to the 1,087 most frequent words. B words are the next 2,111 and C words the final 2,872. Of course the best part is that the entire vocabulary list is available for free on mp3 from the publishers web site (commenter found this guest login id - login: guest, password: guest). I’ve already downloaded the MP3s and put them onto my mp3 player.

This book is very cheap, only 8,000원, and tiny. It will easily fit into your pocket making a great travel companion on the subway so you can read the words as you listen to them on your MP3 player. A couple of areas for improvement: I’d rather see the words split into three lists alphabetically rather than one alphabetical list with each word coded to the corresponding word frequency. Not a big deal but definitely something I would prefer.

More important to me is having a male voice for the recordings. Currently, the recordings are only available in a female voice. I don’t get enough exposure to male native speaker Korean voices, but I’m happy enough having a word frequency list with MP3s.

The first section of the book is an introduction and grammar explanation. The introduction is very nationalistic and should be avoided at all costs. The grammar explanations are cryptic and filled with poor English grammar. Apparently adjectives have been renamed to pre-nouns but if you really want to learn all that you can read through it. This book is available in versions for Chinese and Japanese speakers as well. Presumably the Chinese version would have better grammar explanations as the author has a PhD in Chinese literature from Beijing University.

On first impression, discounting the nationalism in the introduction, I give this book a 4 out of 5.