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.
Tag: thank you!!!
바른 한국어 (Quick Korean)
바른 한국어 (Quick Korean) is a Korean learning programme made by The Cyber University of Korea aimed at foreigners who want to learn the language and it’s amazing. I’ve never seen a post talking about it so let me explain it real quick:
You can register on their webpage, but you can skip this step. I personally think that it’s a good idea to do so because you can keep track of your progress and there are tests at the end of each level to see if you’ve actually learned the material (you even get a diploma!). Also, each lesson has an audio and pdf alongside to it so you can study and practice by yourself. The pdfs are quite simple and don’t come with much explanation, but if you use all the materials they offer, you can kinda understand everything.
If you don’t want to register, that’s okay too! You can watch all their videos on their youtube channel (you can go to their playlist to just watch the videos of x level). You can watch the video for level 1 in English, Korean, Spanish or Chinese, but from level 2 onwards, all the explanations are made in Korean. This can be a little bit scary, but the hosts speak very clearly and repeat everything several times so you have time to process it all. Also, they have foreign students on each lesson (at least on level 2), so you can actually hear peolple with different accents.
The videos are ~30min long and have different sections like vocabulary and grammar and listening. I’ve found them to be super helpful and I hope you guys enjoy them too!
Sutdy-Korean 