Let's Learn Korean

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Total words: 982

So I received three new Korean books through the post to keep me occupied over these few weeks while I reside in 영국. Waiting for my new teaching visa to be processed I thought what better way to spend my time than to study Korean and so an internet book-spending spree ensued.

I received the two books I mentioned in my last post, Professor Alexander Arguelles’s ‘A Historical, Literary and Cultural Approach to the Korean Language’, Minho Choo’s ‘Using Korean’. I also got hold of Minhoo Choo and William O’Grady’s ‘Handbook of Korean Vocabulary: A Resource for Word Recognition and Comprehension’, which has had considerable discussion on this site already.

First of all I would thoroughly recommend all three of these books for anyone above the level of a beginner, especially those like myself who find themselves straddling the line between being a beginner and intermediate learner and feeling disillusioned because of an apparent lack of appropriate studying resources. Quite simply I can be sure the money I’ve spent on these books has been an excellent investment for my learning already. All three of them are quite unique and different to anything else I’ve come across on the market.

Today I’ll give you my initial reactions to ‘Approach to the Korean Language’. Polyglot Professor Alexander Arguelles dedicates his life to studying foreign languages, as explained on his website here. He spent 9 years living in Korea, during which time he studied languages, especially Korean, for as many as 8 hours a day. In his own words the book is ‘an attempt to fill the need for a scholarly method for learning to speak, to understand and-above all-to read Korean.

This is a book in the same vein as Richard Harris’s ‘Roadmap to Korean’ of a book written by a foreign expert in the language, written with the perspective of an English speaker in mind. However I prefer this book to Harris’s so far due to the depth it goes into. In particular the guide to pronunciation changes in 한글 is the best I’ve ever come across explaining them in the kind of depth that would benefit more advanced learners too with names that actually helps you make sense of them and therefore remember them. An example is that of ‘nasalisation (코소리 되기)’ for example where ㅂ before ㅁ or ㄴ becomes [ㅁ] and in a similar fashion when ㄷ before ㅁ or ㄴ becomes [ㄴ].

Another point I really like is that he considers the Korean language as a whole including the North Korean form, which most books would almost have you believe doesn’t exist by their exclusive focus on the South Korean form.

He is very confident of his method for learning Korean and makes no excuses about the very high difficulty of Korean recommending that ‘constant repetition is the key to mastery and progress’. He also writes brilliantly on the practice of romanisation of 한글, often in books written by Koreans, that it ‘is ostensibly offered as an aid to the foreigner learner, but it is so obviously an impediment to the learning of the Korean script that it almost seems designed to prevent outsiders from learning to read Korean’. I couldn’t agree more!

After this kind of introduction to the language, reading 한글 and grammar the books goes into 20 lessons each beginning with a text, which gets increasingly long as the book goes on, introducing things of Korean cultural value such as traditional songs, rhymes, stories (such as the ungrateful tiger) and information about things like Korean food. Included in each lesson are pronunciation notes for difficult words in each text, cultural notes, grammar notes and the learning of Chinese characters - 한자 (one of my favourite bits of the book). Everything so far seems very thorough.

While I am no novice to Korean and would say I easily know at least 1000 words, I still encountered words in every lesson that I didn’t know, probably mainly due to the fact it focuses on written Korean. The cultural notes are invaluable too, for example one which describes the meaning of the 도깨비, which are imaginary creatures in old Korean folktales which are analogous to those of brownies, elves, imps and poltergeists in European folklore.

There are listening tapes which can be bought separately which would be a must for beginners still unsure about the sounds of 한글 and lots of exercises to test you after each chapter. Personally I am fine without the tapes and choose not to do the exercises, instead looking up new words I find in the ‘Handbook of Korean Vocabulary’ to learn the 한자 associated with them which helps me to remember them and link them to words I already know. So far I’ve managed to do 3 lessons in about 2 hours with this method studying alone.

All in all, an excellent book with a fresh perspective on Korean that definitely fills a much needed gap in the market. Best for beginners who are comfortable with the basics in my opinion, though it could be worked through as a complete beginner with the accompanying audio tapes.

The price is a drawback however - £27 = just over 50 US Dollars if you buy it from The Book Depository though worldwide delivery is free including to Korea. At this price it’s definitely for those that are sure they are going to make a commitment to Korean by working through it.

Another possible drawback for keen learners is that while at the time of publishing (2000) the book promised future more advanced volumes, 8 years down the line they have not yet been forthcoming. This could be because the Professor has been busy writing advanced Korean newspaper readers up until this point however, so hopefully he’ll get round to it soon.

Has anyone else got hold of it or books with similar approaches to Korean?

Read Less...

Posted by 제임스 on Tuesday Sep 30, 2008 at 07:37 PM in Books |
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Saturday, September 27, 2008

Total words: 216

제임스

Greetings fellow Korean enthusiasts

I’ve signed up to be an author on this blog with the view of getting things going again around here. An unkempt blog becomes off putting to new users and regulars alike and so by posting about the currently and newly available books and resources for learning Korean I hope to stimulate discussion to help us all in our goal of learning this at times mystifying but ultimately rewarding language.

A little about me. I’ve been living in Korea for one year so far in the city of 대전 (Daejeon) and studying Korean for the same length of time. I briefly wrote a column in the Korea Herald on my experiences as a learner of Korean but found the article specification too limiting and the word count too low to discuss anything in much depth.

In the coming days and weeks I’ll be reviewing and sharing some of the new and as of yet un-discussed books and online resources I’ve recently found. Particularly I will be featuring reviews of two books that have not had a proper write up yet, the polyglot Dr Alexander Arguelles’s ‘A Historical, Literary and Cultural Approach to the Korean Language’ and Miho Choo’s ‘Using Korean: A Guide to Contemporary Usage’.

여러분 다시 한국어에 대해서 대화 합시다!

제임스

Posted by 제임스 on Saturday Sep 27, 2008 at 08:20 PM in Books |
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Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Total words: 153

joesp

This book looks like living history, especially of the connection between 재벌 and politics.

So far the historical side is not disappointing, mentioning some big names of famous people in personal context in the first chapter. The self-aggrandizing rhetoric itself involves both studying Korean and learning what politicians say (at least), and maybe that they must have gone through the 재벌 to get political power, perhaps. The organization of the first chapter was pretty bad, like a holy stream of consciousness batman style. As with the last book, I update my blog with the details and study a lot in front of my site and the electronic dictionary for the 1-2. Same as with 언제나 떠날 수 있는 놈, there are about 5 or 6 words per page which I look up. Some words I skip over. It’s a challenge but as my first Korean history project I am interested in the material.

Posted by joesp on Wednesday Jan 2, 2008 at 10:04 AM in Books |
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Friday, February 16, 2007

Total words: 365

王音癡

I picked up 6000 Korean Essential Vocabulary from the bookstore today. This book looks to be an excellent resource. It is essentially a vocabulary building book with the 6,000 words most useful to learners of Korean. The vocabulary is arranged alphabetically, in Korean, with English translations on the right.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Total words: 78

王音癡

I recently signed up with Library Thing and have been cataloging my books. You can see more details about library thing at EFL Geek. I have, however finished with my Korean resources and there should be 19, as of February 13, 2007, appearing in the extended entry. if not, you should be able to see the complete collection here.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Total words: 36

王音癡

오늘 읽기 수업은 우리 새댁 요코짱의 한국살이의 발췌문을 읽었어요. 그 발췌문 서강 한국어 3B page 83. 그책은 친구한테 빌렸는데 지금은 첵중에서 몇쪽이 알줄 몰랐어요.

여러분 아직 안읽었으면 사러 문고 가세요. 이책은 쉽고 재미 있고 읽어 볼만해요.

Posted by 王音癡 on Tuesday Feb 6, 2007 at 01:57 PM in In the classroom | Reading | Books |
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Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Total words: 274

롸이언

Authors: Iksop Lee & S. Robert Ramsey

I just finished reading this book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is a serious learner of the language. It goes into considerable detail about many aspects of the language from the history to the grammar to the modern dialects. I liked that it dug deeper than the familiar, “King Sejong invented Hangeul in 1444(6)…” that is at the beginning of all of our textbooks. The authors discuss previous writing systems, the development of Hangeul, and orthography. While this is by no means a textbook for learning Korean, about half of the book covers grammar and the sociolinguistics of Korean honorifics and speech styles. This helped answer a lot of my questions about when to use which style.

As with many books on Korean, this book suffers from an overuse of Romanization. While it does give the primary examples in both Yale Romanization and Hangeul, many of the examples and terms in the text are either Romanized or translated into English. It would have been nice to know some of the grammatical/linguistic terms used in this book in Korean. This book also uses a fair bit of Hanja in its explanations, but, does not give their Hangeul or English equivalents. I find this very strange that a book would assume someone would know Hanja but not Hangeul.

Except for the small problem of the Romanization, I highly recommend this book as it will illuminate so many interesting things about the language that you did not even know existed. It really gets “under the hood” of Korean and lets you see how it all works.

Posted by 롸이언 on Wednesday Jan 11, 2006 at 08:19 PM in Books |
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