Let's Learn Korean - 6000 Korean Essential Vocabulary

Total words: 365

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.

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.

Posted by 王音癡 on Friday Feb 16, 2007 in Vocabulary Books Internet Resources | |

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트랙백:

wow, this is just what i’ve been looking for. thanks for posting about it. i tried to register for the website to download the .mp3s, but apparently one needs a 주민등록번호 to do so. I guess I’ll have to ask a Korean friend to get them for me… or do they have some way of verifying that you’ve purchased the book (I haven’t yet). Thanks again ! ^^

Posted by dr on Friday Feb 16, 2007 at 03:49 PM
dr,
you could try emailing or () which is the contact address on the back inside cover of the book. It’s very short sited to have the MP3s for foreigners behind a registration requirement that they cannot meet unless they live in Korea and have an id.

for the record the total download size is 73.8mb

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호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Friday Feb 16, 2007 at 03:56 PM
wow, good information.
I have to check this book out myself.

I wonder what the mp3 file is like.
do they read out everything in the book or one Korean word and equivalent in English?

한국어를 배우는 외국인들을 겨냥한 책들이
점점 더 다양하게 나온다는 것은 정말 좋은 일인 것 같아요.
전에는 영어 학습용 교재를 이용해야 하는 경우도 많았죠.

Posted by future-kteacher on Wednesday Mar 7, 2007 at 11:09 PM
I put that list on my site. I translated them from a download from http://21cseonbi.blogspot.com/
somehow i got them down to 5730, with diffrent parts of speech and nobody to help me translate.
anyway, go to ezcorean.com and they are there on the home page on the left side (middle box IIRC).
You are supposed to go through the list and add words you don’t know to your vocabulary list and take quizzes on them later (for reinforcement).

HAND

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ezcorean.com

Posted by joesp on Monday Mar 12, 2007 at 07:43 PM
joesp, that site is awesome! is it yours? i knew about your old blog, but not about that one… i wasn’t able to find the .mp3s anywhere, though… are they there, too? thanks for the link!

Posted by dr on Monday Mar 12, 2007 at 07:59 PM
sorry, man, i don’t have the mp3s. THe first blog, http://letslearnkorean.com/index.php?URL=http://21cseonbi.blogspot.com/ isn’t mine, it’s sewing’s. I just found out about his list and translated it. It was tricky work. You think you know something, and you don’t.

this place is cool, too.

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ezcorean.com

Posted by joesp on Tuesday Mar 13, 2007 at 12:01 AM
Looks like an interesting site. I’ve added a link on the sidebar. I’m curious as to why you use Korean with a “C”

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호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Tuesday Mar 13, 2007 at 06:04 AM
Joesp,
Thanks for the compliment and if you would like to blog here, let me know after you register and I’ll change your permissions.

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호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Tuesday Mar 13, 2007 at 06:10 AM
howdy tiger.... i am trying to figure out the pronunciation of your name, in hangul. I am wondering if you are 지원자 ? he posts a lot on zkorean (now at http://korean.paperwindow.com/forum/index.php).
As for ezcorean ( with a C) .... it’s one of those yahoo 1-year registration for $1.99 deals. Oh, honestly, ezkorean was taken, so I had no choice. Even though it’s true, I can’t say that i did so because the Japanese changed the spelling of Corean to Korean to put it alphabetically after Japan. (like, French still says coreen).

yes, you have done a great job. Integrating a blog and a forum is no easy undertaking. And the front-end looks very nice as well, which is a special combination of two skills, of which I lack in the latter. I remember you remodelled the site about, what, 6 months ago? it has come out really nice.

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ezcorean.com

Posted by joesp on Tuesday Mar 13, 2007 at 10:26 PM
Joesp,
The hanja written in Korean is 왕음치.

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호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Wednesday Mar 14, 2007 at 06:38 AM
I was able to special order this book (and the Learner’s Dictionary of Korean) from http://www.seoulselection.com and they mailed to the US for me. I couldn’t buy it from a Korean site directly as I don’t have a Korean National ID#. I had to get a Korean friend to download the MP3s for me though.

Posted by Daemon on Thursday Apr 26, 2007 at 12:00 PM
Good to hear you managed to order it. Honestly I think someone needs to contact the web site that hosts the MP3 files and ask them why they keep them behind a barrier that foreigners cannot access.

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호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Friday Apr 27, 2007 at 07:31 AM
Hi there! I’ve ordered tihs book a few days ago. I was unable to download the MP3 files and contacted LanguagePlus about this. It turns out you have to sign in using a guest account (login: guest, password: guest) in order to be able to download the MP3 files as a non-registered member. On a sidenote, I also suggested them to add files featuring a male voice since many of us learners are male and would actually prefer learning how to speak as a male Korean speaker. They answered me they’re going to consider it.

Posted by 루벤 on Friday Jun 22, 2007 at 11:55 PM
That’s good news. I’ll add the guest login info to the main poast now.

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호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Saturday Jun 23, 2007 at 08:10 AM