Berlitz Korean Phrase Book

by Berlitz Publishing Company

Your first lesson in Korean: an-nyong haseyo means hello, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening! Learning essential Korean words and phrases doesn't have to be difficult. This... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 2831562686
• ISBN13: 9782831562681
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Berlitz Publishing
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 4.1" x 5.7"

Customer Reviews

Berlitz is smarter than other reviewers

This book is an excellent resource for the casual traveler. It appears to me that the "mistakes" other reviewers, namely theemigre, find in the book are in fact not mistakes. For example, although in Hangul museum is written as "pak-mul-kwan", the words are not supposed to be pronounced this way, but rather "pang-mul-gwan". Think about English, a word ending in "t" then followed by "y" goes through a morphophonemic change becoming "ch": e.g. whatcha doin'? In Korean, morphophonemic changes are everywhere between syllables. If you learn Hangul, you won't know what those changes are and your pronunciation will be wrong. Words in different contexts may have different pronunciations. So stick with the pronunciations in the book. Here's a quote from page 8 after introducing the Hangul alphabet: "These are the main sounds connected with each letter, but they can vary and this is reflected in the imitated pronunciation for individual phrases." It is also ok to not put accents on words in Korean and maintain a steady intonation. It looks like the guys at Berlitz know what they're doing when they write these romanizations. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt, rather than some layman traveler who learned what the Hangul letter "k" is but didn't learn it can also be pronounced "ng" before a nasal consonant. Besides most travelers won't be attempting Hangul. Let's just be glad theemigre wasn't reviewing a Tibetan phrasebook. I give this book 5 stars because it fulfills the expectations of a phrasebook and nothing more except a little bit of notes about history and culture and food. As a phrasebook I believe it meets the needs of the casual traveler. It fulfills the need for any kind of traveling situation like eating or shopping when you need to find the name of an item quickly and discuss the price. And the more serious language learner who doesn't have time to take classes can actually learn quite a bit from this book.