Showing posts with label Min Woo Park. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Min Woo Park. Show all posts

"Learn to Read Korean in 60 Minutes: The Ultimate Crash Course to Learning Hangul Through Psychological Associations" by Blake Miner, Yoo Jin Lee & Min Woo Park (2015)

, 19 Jun 2016

THE GOODIES
+ The book is very cute, very simple to go through, and the associations to learn each vowel and consonant very useful.
+ The book is unpretentious, fun and right to the point.
+ The book does what it promises and you will be able to read basic words in Korean if not in 60 minutes, in 90 minutes, which is the time I used.
+ Very useful illustrations.
+ A cheapie.

THE NONOS
+ The use of Roman equivalents is a bit messed up mostly because the authors don't do something that would have been more helpful, i.e. to use the International Phonetic System, which is Universal. Mind, not all English speakers pronounce vowels and diphthongs the same.
+ I had some problems with the s and the j basically because the seashell used to associate the letter s looked more like the shape of the character of letter j.
+ I found that some of the diphthongs were not well explained, comparing to online free courses.
+ Some final consonants are mute but those or when this occurred is not mentioned. 
+ The pronunciation of some letters is inaccurate or incomplete.
+ This is a bait to get you to their online paid program to learn Korean.
You can find better stuff for free online,  for example
http://seemile.com
http://www.korean-course.com/index.en.php?page=alphabet01

I MISSED
I would have loved hearing the pronunciation of the words in Korean  by natives. Which would be really easy to do if the Kindle book had a link that got you online to a place where these words are pronounced or to a downloadable file. Other similar books on Korean have this feature.

Overall, a very cute useful book, that does what it promises, get you to recognise the hangeul alphabet and to read basic words. There are basic courses online, for free, with videos, done by Koreans, so that is always better. However, I found the association technique really helpful and that is the main virtue of this booklet.