Any good books to learn Korean?

There are those "Korean-in-a-hurry" books and stuff, but what I find to be much more helpful is reading comic books. That sounds silly, but the language is a lot more colloquial and thus, much more applicable (my friend gave me on Aesop's fables in Korean). You can start out with books for much younger kids, so it's easier.

I don't know if this helped me at all, but a pastor once had me copy a few chapters in the bible in Korean. If you get one of those Korean-English bibles, they have the two sections lined up so you can compare the two, I guess. I have to warn you, the Korean's kind of hard to understand.

Talking to people in any language is one of the most helpful factors in learning to speak. You said you have Korean friends, so bring along a Korean dictionary and break free with them. Don't worry about sounding stupid, cause it's great that you're learning to be bilingual. Or go to a place with lots of Korean people (a Korean church maybe?).

Schaum's Outlines Beginning Korean.

Go to Asia. I find it easier to learn another language if you visit the country that speaks it. Knowing little at the start, but ending up with knowing a lot.

I can help you like friend if you want.

(i'm a korean international student)

IM KRN =))

well this mite help...

http://rki.kbs.co.kr/learn_korean/lessons/e_index....

I repoduce outsideinkorea.com which you will find useful

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A Free Korean Language CoursePosted to: Culture | Education | Language

Tagged: communicate | learn | speak | study

Just as there are a lot of terrible ESL books out there, there are also a lot of egregiously bad textbooks designed for foreign learners of Korean. In fact, I've rarely seen such badly organized and poorly thought out language texts as some of the ones I've tried to use to improve my Korean. It's an insight perhaps, into the quality of language education in primary and secondary schools, if the Korean-made textbooks used to teach English and other languages are as poorly put together. Help is at hand if you're a self-directed student of Korean, though.

The American Foreign Service Institute used to publish a series of courses targetting a wide variety of languages, for the use of diplomats and other government employees posted to overseas positions. The Korean one -- Mastering Korean, available in two levels -- is the best that I've ever seen, the most comprehensive and logically-structured introduction to the grammar and structures of the language

It's not pretty in terms of design -- it has no illustrations whatsoever and is typset in Courier -- and it's not intended as a classroom text, but for self-study, particularly if you have a modicum of knowledge about linguistics and grammar in English, it's very good indeed.

The other good news is that it's in the public domain. So I'm pleased to be able to offer the course for download here, from this site, free of charge. All I ask is that if you link to it, you link to this page, rather than directly to the files in question. Each chapter is in pdf form, and the audio component has been converted to mp3 files.

There is one gotcha, though. The author uses his own romanization, one different from either the old McCune-Reischauer romanization or the revised one adopted by the Korean government since 2000, and there is minimal use of the actual Korean alphabet in the examples and exercises. The romanization used is a sensible one, particularly if one knows the sounds of Korean already, and some of the quirks of pronunciation. If you take care to note, for example, the regular transformation of syllable-ending consonant sounds (for example a consonant-spanning ㅆ is romanized as 'ss', even though it may be pronounced as a t-like unreleased stop followed by the sibilant), you'll be OK. I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the alphabet and its sounds first (it's a matter of a few hours to a few days), then learn the system used in the text, comparing and keeping mindful of the quirks as you go.

So, without further ado: here's a belated Christmas present, Level One of Mastering Korean. Share and enjoy (and if you know of any other good textbooks for learning Korean, please feel free to let everyone know about them below, in the comments).

Table of Contents.pdf

Introductory Unit.pdf

FSI Korean- Introductory Unit Part One.mp3

FSI Korean- Introductory Unit Part Two.mp3

Unit 01.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 01.mp3

Unit 02.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 02.mp3

Unit 03.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 03.mp3

Unit 04.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 04 Part One.mp3

FSI Korean- Unit 04 Part Two.mp3

Unit 05.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 05 Part One.mp3

FSI Korean- Unit 05 Part Two.mp3

Unit 06.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 06 Part One.mp3

FSI Korean- Unit 06 Part Two.mp3

Unit 07.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 07 Part One.mp3

FSI Korean- Unit 07 Part Two.mp3

Unit 08.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 08.mp3

Unit 09.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 09.mp3

Unit 10.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 10 Part One.mp3

FSI Korean- Unit 10 Part Two.mp3

Unit 11.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 11 Part One.mp3

FSI Korean- Unit 11 Part Two.mp3

Unit 12.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 12.mp3

Unit 13.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 13.mp3

Unit 14.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 14.mp3

Unit 15.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 15.mp3

Unit 16.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 16.mp3

Unit 17.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 17.mp3

Unit 18.pdf

FSI Korean- Unit 18.mp3

Glossary.pdf

Index to the Grammar Notes.pdf

Update: You can find the Level Two course here!

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Comments

Hi Chris,

You are awesome. I have been studying Korean for 5 weeks with a long road ahead. This will help me immensly. One of the links isn't working. I have listed it below.

Best regards,

Lynn Johnatakis jhntks@gmail.com 415-584-9492

FSI Korean- Introductory Unit Part One.mp3

Posted by: Lynn Johnatakis | February 5, 2007 4:05 AM

Glad to help, Lynn. Thanks for the heads-up. I've fixed the link!

Posted by: Chris | February 5, 2007 5:19 PM

Hi Chris, I'm getting a different error for all of the links now. Sorry for the problems. It did give me a chace to read many more of the interesting and well written info on the website though. :-)

Here's the error I get for all of the links now.

Not Found

The requested URL /inside/2007/02/FSI/FSI Korean- Introductory Unit Part One.mp3 was not found on this server.

Best regards,

Lynn

Posted by: Lynn Johnatakis | February 8, 2007 11:41 AM

You're right, and I'm a dummy for not checking the links again! Should be OK now.

Posted by: Chris | February 8, 2007 12:42 PM

I copied all the files to my harddrive and put a few on my mp3 player.

First, the displayed name while playing is not correct. I think you have the wrong name encoded in the MP3 file.

Second, the filenames all start with the first few letters. My mp3 player only displays the first few characters of each file name.

-Jeff

Posted by: Jeff Martin | February 23, 2007 5:25 PM

Yeah, you're welcome there, Jeff.

Your mp3 player isn't smart enough to display the filename in the absence of ID3 tags. You can tag them yourself -- it's not exactly rocket science -- or if you must, redownload the mp3's . I've re-tagged them with appropriate track names and reuploaded. I don't understand what your second complaint means, but presumably the corrected ID3 tags will fix it.

Posted by: Chris | February 24, 2007 10:20 PM

I'd be very careful with posting this stuff by Barron's. In fact, I'd consider removing all of it from this site for fear of being sued by Barron's.

It is true that Barron's Korean course is little more than a rip-off of the original course by FSI (which IS in the public-domain in the USA). However, something being in public-domain means that anyone can take that something, alter it and then in turn, slap a copyright on it, even though the core of the material came from the public-domain.

This is exactly what Barron's has done. Barron's course isn't in the public domain, but the course by FSI is. As such, Barron's could sue you for unauthorized distribution/reproduction of "its" product, regardless of the fact that Barron's course is at least 95% identical to that of FSI's version.

The site which links to the Level II FSI Korean course has a strict policy of accepting and posting only material that is clearly in the public-domain. This means that the .pdf and .mp3 files on that website came from tapes and textbooks that were bought by private donors or public libraries from the government (i.e. NTIS). For legal reasons, the administrator has refused to host FSI materials that come from companies such as Barron's, or mail-order companies such as Multilingual Books Inc. and Audio-Forum among several others, even though these companies offer effectively the same content as that of the original course by FSI.

If you do a search of the forums on that website using the keywords "copyright", "bittorrent", "reseller" etc., you will see discussions which have often been closed by the administrator. Understandably he wants to keep everything above board and not put his site or himself at the mercy of lawsuits emnating from companies such as Barron's who charge a premium for burnt CDs and manuals with new shiny covers with the corporate logo and copyright,

Posted by: vput | April 10, 2007 7:46 AM

Kamsahamnida! I love this site. Thank you so much for posting this!

Posted by: Jake | April 27, 2007 3:18 PM

vput: Thanks for your concern, but if it's in the public domain, it's in the public domain, as far as I'm concerned.

If I receive a takedown notice, I'll be happy to consider it, but as far as I'm aware, this is not anyone's copyright-hijacked course, but the original FSI one, which, as I have mentioned, is public domain material. The cover image (which I will remove, as it's misleading) was intended to be illustrative only.

Until I get a takedown request (and possibly thereafter, unless it seems legitimate), I'll leave the materials right where they are.

Posted by: Chris | May 3, 2007 11:35 PM

Hello!! Thankyou sooo sooo much for putting these up... It has been immensly hard for me to find good resources to learn korean... thankyou so much for helping everyone out!!

Posted by: Sonia | May 5, 2007 9:55 PM

As long as the course here is the original FSI Korean Basic course, then you should be fine within the USA. Companies like Barron's and Audio-Forum would no doubt want to shut you down and threaten you with a lawsuit if it turned out that what you're posting came from them instead of FSI directly.

Posted by: vput | May 8, 2007 4:23 AM

Wow, this is great.

I haven't had chance to listent to them all, but I just tried one link.

As I hear it as a native speaker, the male speaker is not a native Korean(I can understand because his name in the dialog is James, right?) but his English is not a native's English, either.

What do you think?

Since I haven't had chance to go over everything, I can't really judge it but I found several mistakes.

For example, 잘 지내십니까?

Both the male and the female speakers say it 잘 지나십니까?

But I'm sure this whole material is quite precious since there aren't really many good books for learners of Korean as you mentioned.

So thank you so much for sharing.

Do you know when this was first published?

Actually, I would like to find some mistakes from this source and let everyone else know about them and hopefully contact the original publisher and republish it with 한글, ^^ haha, too ambitious?

Anyway, when you have time, please visit my website.

Posted by: Hyeyoung Jung | May 17, 2007 7:48 PM

I studies priorily Korea language twice times. But I bave forgetten now. So, I will learn Korea language again.

Posted by: Amartuvshin | May 18, 2007 9:46 PM

Kind of sad that I purchased the Barron's today, not knowing this was in the public domain. Are the actual recordings in the public domain? Barron's just took a recording it didn't make and a text it didn't create and packaged them? I think you are in the clear if you got the recordings for free (e.g., from the FSI), and there were no copyright restrictions there. If you took a poem by Keats and retyped it and sold the book, I couldn't photocopy your book, but I could retype the poem and sell it on my own. What's your source?

There is an advantage to buying, since the sound is so low on your mp3s. But thank you for posting.

Posted by: David | June 4, 2007 8:42 AM

I just want to say thankyou very much for your efforts :).

Posted by: Jarra | June 5, 2007 8:43 PM

"As long as the course here is the original FSI Korean Basic course, then you should be fine within the USA. Companies like Barron's and Audio-Forum would no doubt want to shut you down and threaten you with a lawsuit"

Nah, that's not how it works. If they did think posting this was copyright infringing (which, again, I don't believe it to be), they'd send me a takedown notice. If I did not comply with the takedown notice, they would then have the option of legal recourse -- but, as I said, if I received a takedown notice and it seemed substantive, I'd remove the materials.

(Send 'em to wonderchickenindustries at gmail dot com, by the way, if any lawyer-types actually do come sniffing around)

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