hannah-dulset:

woailanguages:

Hi everyone! I wanted to ask you all for opinions about some Korean textbooks, mainly focusing on grammar, since I can’t pick one and wanted to know what are the pros & cons of them. Have you used any? Or just heard that they’re good/bad for some reason? Tell me, please ^_^

Particulary interested in these:

• Basic Korean
  
• College Korean
  
• Korean Grammar for International Learners
  
• Korean Grammar in Use
  
• Using Korean

(My answer was too long for the answer box haha) 

I have them all actually. (Though only KGIU and KGIL as hard copies.) I wouldn’t say any of them are bad per say, but there are definitely a couple I prefer. 

KGIU, Basic Korean and College Korean are like actually studying textbooks, while KGIL and Using Korean are linguistic textbooks; i.e. no exercises, heavy use of linguistic vocabulary, that kind of thing. 

KGIU is my favorite of the textbooks, as it covers the most information, and I enjoy the way it’s set up for easy comparison between similar grammar points. (I have an in depth review here)

Basic Korean has nice in depth explanations, teaches hangul (KGIU doesn’t), and has nice exercises, but I don’t feel like it quite covers enough to be a comprehensive “beginner” book. I think you’d need to have both the basic and intermediate book to really cover what is in KGIU or what is tested on in beginner level TOPIK.

College Korean is set up like most classroom books, where each lesson teaches a couple grammar points/notes, you get a list of vocab from the dialogue, and then some exercises. Content wise it falls between the other two, but with probably the shortest explanations (or it makes you refer and flip between lessons, which is annoying with a PDF.) It also teaches several hanja a lesson, which if you have a background in them is fine, but I think is too overwhelming for most beginners.

For the linguistics books, Using Korean is definitely the better all around book of the two. It doesn’t quite have as many points of grammar covered as KGIL, but it also contains a great section on vocabulary that discusses sino vs native, number systems, mimetics and onomatopoeias, as well as similarly used vocab. It also has (it’s first section) dedicated to how Korean is used, including titles/honorifics, satoori, fillers, softening your speech, and how written and spoken Korean differ.

KGIL definitely goes in depth in its explanations of different aspects of Korean grammar, but it is through and through a linguistics textbook, and even if your well read in linguistic terms, it can still be a bit dense of a read in parts. Its well written, but I’d only recommend it if you’re really into linguistics.

This ended up super long but I hope my opinions of them help a bit haha. If you want to look through them all yourself before you throw down any money I have pdfs of them all in my masterlist here, so you can see for yourself too.