Spoken World: Korean- A Complete Course for Beginners (Living Language) Unabridged Edition

clam shell, discs, and book all in very good condition, arrived quickly, thank you very much

As an experienced language learner, I can honestly say that the Living Language series is, by far, the best on the market. Specifically, the Living Language Ultimate series and Spoken World series offer an entertaining and effective approach toward language learning. I have found that this product succeeds where others seem to have failed. For example, the audio for the Assimil series is terrible, as the speakers talk at such a slow pace that there's a good chance you'll be waking up several hours later. The reading and writing aspects are other areas in which courses such as Teach Yourself and Pimsleur have dropped the ball. Pimsleur offers zero text and hence, is absolutely useless to anyone who is serious about learning the language. While Teach Yourself does offer text, the authors for some reason or another have decided that it would be better to use romanization. Living Language is the most complete course I have found as both the written content and the accompanying audio are excellent. Here, the authors have taken a sensible approach, using Hangeul with the aid of transliteration in the first few chapters, and then introducing the text in Hangeul. The conversations also are lively, natural, and above all, practical. You will find that every chapter is filled with content that is pertinent, useful and applicable to actual conversations. Unfortunately, for Rosetta Stone fans, you will not find sentences such as "the octopus is behind the library". My only complaint is that the course could be longer. I would also recommend supplementing the material with a dictionary and grammar workbook. Even so, the course is great. If I were to any one product, Pimsleur (trash), Teach Yourself, or Assimil (although the latter two are also excellent in their own right) I would recommend this one.

I've tried Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone and various other techniques to learning languages and this one is fantastic. I don't want to compare them to Pimsleur and the Stone because they use different methods. Spoken Word Korean is perfect for beginners and engages you properly. It is very user-friendly and easy to understand.

It didn't teach things very well. Lots of new vocabulary was introduced without definitions of what these new words were. Some of the greetings were out of date, and the people that I go to church with that are from South Korea agreed that this was a terrible book for someone trying to learn their language. If you want a fantastic language learning tool I recommend buying Rosetta Stone!

Best for learn Korean!!!I have a lot of books and this is the best. A little expensive but is really good.:)

helpful

ok

Love it!

I would not recommend this book for a beginner - it really throws you in the deep end with the dialogues (which are the main Korean parts of the book) and only slowly teaches you enough grammar to understand the constituent parts of even the first dialogue, rather than just memorize whole words or phrases without really understanding why they mean what they do, or what the difference is between 2 versions of the same word.I have some particular criticisms of this as part of the Spoken World series, since I also own Spoken World Croatian which is much better- the dialogues in the Korean book are very boring and mechanical compared to the Croatian dialogues- the Korean book is MUCH shorter in length - the 'Culture Topics' are fewer, shorter and less interesting/ in-depth than in the Croatian book (and some 'Culture Topic 1' sections just tell you some grammar- both books have only four, somewhat boring exercises at the end of each chapter, that don't really help you use what you've learned enough for it to stick (I like to learn by doing, rather than memorizing).Good things- the Korean one DOES have good 'independent challenge' suggestions at the end of each chapter.- it seems to explain grammar clearly, just not in tandem with the language that is being presented in the dialogues.I bought this for a good price, and to work on conversation and vocab - in retrospect I think that Wild Korean (which also comes with audio, available online) would have been a better buy for increasing my conversation and vocabulary. It's supposed to be more interesting, seems to have more content, and the meanings of the phrases used are broken down (although it's not sold for beginners, there is a book Mild Korean if you want to start as a beginner using that series).I did think that this one might be better because you get 6 CDs, which is a lot - but they're not very easy to work with away from the book. The only English used is in setting up questions in set B, so the assumption is that you have already learned what all the words and phrases mean on your own, without the help of the CDs, except for pronunciation help. The 'conversation practice' is mostly just repitition of parts of the dialogues, and the 'grammar practice' (in the first chapters at least) is too easy and boring. Maybe that is me speaking as someone who's no longer a beginner - an example is sticking 'neun' or 'eun at the end of a bunch of words, depending if the word ends in a vowel or consonant.If you want a beginner course, I wouldn't start here. If you want a conversation course, I would go with Wild Korean instead. I would recommend Korean for Beginners to anyone who likes good grammar explanations - something that has been a bit hit and miss in all the other Korean textbooks I've tried so far. You can still get stuff from it, but there are probably other places you could get that stuff better.