Teach Yourself Korean Complete Course Package (Book + 2 CDs) [With Book] (Teach Yourself Language Complete Courses) [Paperback]

Teach Yourself Korean is a great book if you want to learn more than just "tourist phrases." The introduction with Han-Geul was clear and easy to understand. If your first language is English, the grammar and pronunciation rules will seem strange and hard to remember at first, but this is true for most Asian languages. Since Korean is not a tonal language, such as Chinese or Vietnamese, your learning will not be hindered by worries about "singing" the words. Each section includes an introduction listing the aspects of the Korean language you will learn. The dialogues in each section aren't dry either. They contain many colloquial Korean phrases and expressions that are explained later in the chapter. The dialogues are shown in Han-Geul and are followed by McCune-Reischauer romanisations. The romanisations were one of the aspects of the book that could have been improved. Sometimes they were inconsistent with the Han-Geul and left me wondering which pronunciations were correct. The vocabulary boxes were extremely helpful, but since the words were not translated directly under the Han-Geul dialogues, I had to keep flipping pages to understand what I was reading. This ruined the flow of the conversations a little bit. The commentary was the core of the book. It explained aspects of Korean culture and taught me how to construct Korean sentences. Although the authors attempt to keep the explanations simple, some of the grammar commentary sections needed to be read and re-read in order to absorb the information. The upside of this is that repitition reinforces memory. The exercises are varied and cover a wide range of problems. The book recommends that one completes the exercises using Han-Geul, but beginners can use romanistation as well. Some of the answer keys in the back of the book provided answers that seemed strange, and this was a major hindrance for me. I would re-read the grammar commentary to see if I had missed anything, only to find out that we would learn a certain verb-construction or colloquialism in later sections. All in all, this was a great book, but it needs some polishing.

This simple set of CD and a book is as effective as its Pimsleur counterpart if not more. First of all, this one has a book that explains the cultures, and grammars, not to mention the full translation of the dialogues from the CD in both Romanized and actual Korean alphabet. So you learn the spoken Korean as well as reading (and writing if you put in the effort). I have the version with cassettes then I got the CD version, it's even better than before. There are no typos now, and it's better organized.

I bought this book after moving to Korea to help learn the language. I found it a great resource and easy to use. I also thought that it helped me as a English teacher in Korea by teaching a lot of useful classroom dialogue, as well as work related things, like how to great spouses etc. I worked through this book on my own and found it was extremely possible to learn from and the excercises at the end of each chapter really emphasize you learning the Korean. I would say that if you are like me and finding yourself suddenly surrounded by Korean this book is a great way of demystifying it.