Korean in Plain English, Second Edition

by Boyé Lafayette de Mente

Book Overview

Next time someone asks if you speak Korean, you can say Chugum hal chul amnida (Choe-guum hahl chuul ahm-nee-dah).*

With Korean in Plain English, you can speak Korean in no time Its easy-to-use pronunciation system and straightforward presentation of the basics of the language--with plenty of useful sentences--help you break the language barrier quickly and confidently. How? All the words and phrases in this book are...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0071482970
• ISBN13: 9780071482974
• Release Date: February 2007
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

fulfills its purpose

This book never claimed to be a comprehensive guide to the Korean language. I'll be going to Korea to work soon, and I needed a guide with a fun approach, so that the task of learning conversational Korean wouldn't be so daunting. The book claims to offer "a basic introduction to Spoken Korea or just a few words to get by on a trip." It helped me to overcome the phobia of learning a new language, so I believed it fulfilled its purpose.

Good little phrase book

This is a nice little phrase book and basic vocabulary book on Korean, although I was looking for something with a better description of the grammar. The author provides a list of 1200 words along with 1200 of the most common phrases in which they're used, and for someone wanting a Berlitz-type travel guide and phrase book this would be fine. The author provides a brief history of the Korean alphabet, which is phonetic, like most Indo-European languages. He also discusses briefly pronunciation and how it differs from English--such as the lack of syllable stress and the consonants being similar to English but for the vowels being more like Spanish or a typical romance language--rather than English. Finally the author discusses the phonetics he uses, which is different from the typical conventions on this, but justifies it by saying it reflects more accurately how Korean actually sounds. I didn't mind it too much but would have preferred the more traditional system. But it was okay. Overall, a good little phrase book if that's all you need, but I would have liked at least a few pages devoted to the basics of the grammar, and I don't see why that couldn't have been done.