Speaking Korean by Francis Y.T.Park

wakold · Tourist Joined: Oct 23, 2009 Posts: 20

If you are really serious about learning the Korean language and you wish to fully understand grammtical concepts, sentence structures, reading stories and so on, I would definitely recommend this book.

It comes in 4 volumes, and each volume is a brick of around 400 to 500 pages. The 3rd volume is exclusively dedicated to teaching Chinese characters used in the Korean language or Chinese characters from whom many words come from. So if you are already an advanced learner and you wish to fully grasp and understand deeply Korean, I would say it is for you.

I am halfway through the second book now and it is a very complete and concise piece of work. Don't expect anything fancy, no pictures, no shiny pages, but for 33$ you get more than what you pay for(Although on Amazon.com it goes for something like 80$). It is a bit "old style" kind of teaching method, lots of drilling and examples, but I find it's really helpful. All the grammatical rules are explained very well. Once this book is finished reading, you can expect to have a good ability to read Korean texts and a definitely extended vocabulary and good understanding of grammatical rules and how to build up sentences. To go through the whole book, I would say it takes at least a few months.

I first finished the series "Korean made easy" by Seung-Eun Oh, and these books were really great and helpful, and I was looking for a book that would be suitable for the level I had reached, and although this book is a bit advanced, it proved to be well suitable for me. I would recommend it to anyone serious about learning Korean! I didn't read the first book but I plan to buy it for reference purposes, but I assume it's pretty similar in concept than the second book. Good value for money!