Let's Learn Korean - Book Review: The Korean Language

Total words: 274

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 in Books | |

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