Elfira Yolanda S

Integrated Korean: Beginning 1, 2nd Edition by Young-Mee Cho

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my first Korean textbook and I love it! It has 8 units and each unit has 2 conversations, a narration, usage example of the lessons learned in the unit, and a piece on Korean culture snipplet. The audio files are provided in KLEAR website.

The Grammar Points and Vocabulary

I have no complain against the grammar taught in this book. At my beginner level, I’d just welcome any points taught and be happy to be able to create more simple sentences throughout the lessons. Since it’s a college textbook, the vocabulary revolves around campus life and it’s perfectly ok with me.

I love it that they only use romanization at some parts in the introduction. I’m not a big fan of romanization. It surely helps at certain point, like when the first time learning 한글, or when we communicate with those who are not learning Korean (btw, 한글 is Hangul, the Korean writing system), or when the tools are not capable for writing in 한글.

For Korean learning textbooks and dictionary, I prefer romanization served at minimum or almost zero rate. That’s why I prefer Collin’s gem dictionary instead of Berlitz. Thanks to Febry, the dictionary is on the way, yay!

The Exercises

The book does not have the answer key and I read that even the workbook of this KLEAR series don’t have the answer key provided. The exercises tend to be short in number and some are only applicable in a classroom or with partners (not quite suitable for a self learner like me). Despite all that, I’m grateful to have those exercises.

Other Parts

I love the introduction, the objectives list, and the closing part of the book. My favorite part of the introduction is the pronunciation rules. It’s the part where I always keep running to whenever I hear different from the sound I am expecting to catch on my ears. I mark this part with post-it.

The objectives list provide us the summary of each unit, which grammar points at which part, what culture snipplet and what kind of usage. Needless to say, it’s one helpful list for ㅁ reference. As the new grammar rules come, I use this list a lot.

The last few pages in this book consist of appendices, grammar index, and the glossary. More references which if I knew about it sooner, it would make my studying time more efficient. I even left out the glossary until I reached Unit 8, the last unit. Before that, I kept turning the previous pages to find what certain word meant and it happened like thousand times! *sigh*

The glossary is Korean-English, and vice versa. The Korean-English one can be useful to learn the 한글 alphabet order. I’m so gonna use this one for my next books of this series! (Hope the books will arrive safely next week, cross my fingers xD)

이 책을 정말 좋아해요. 여러분, 한국어 재미있지요? ^^

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