Recent Book Reviews

Your First Hanja Guide is a 한자 (hanjja, or Chinese characters used in the Korean language) reference book co-written by the staff at Talk to Me in Korean (TTMIK). This book is one of their few books aimed both at their intermediate and advanced learners of Korean and is meant to be an introduction to common Korean words of Chinese origin used in everyday language.

As with most of their books, the presentation is flawless; the fonts used throughout the book are very legible and large enough (very welcome because of the high number of strokes in a lot of 한자), the colors are harmonious,  and some of the inserts help graphically break down the composition of Chinese characters. The counterpart of this great presentation is that this book wastes a lot of white space that could be used to add a lot more characters in order to be truly useful to advanced Korean learners.

Your First Hanja Guide is a great book to get initiated about the world of 한자 (Chinese characters) for intermediate students, but advanced students will probably feel let down by this book that has nearly not enough content (only 118 한자) to be used as a reference.

Advantages

• Amazing introduction to Chinese characters for intermediate learners of Korean who have never been in contact with them.
• Graphical breakdown of characters to show their composition.
• Memonic provided for each character to remember the meaning from the character composition.
• Welcome presence of stroke order for each character (Chinese Character Cognates: 808 Common Hanja for example does not include them).
• Pronunciation of the examples for each character included as a download.
• Great presentation for self-taught students (quizzes, thematic order).

Drawbacks

• The book contains only 118 characters, when the book Chinese Character Cognates: 808 Common Hanja has 808 characters in about the same number of pages (352 for Your First Hanja Guide).
• Advanced learners will thus probably already know most of the examples in the book. 
• The book gives many examples of words using each character, but few example sentences (which is regrettable, as some pages are half-filled with white space). For example, the pages for 호 (好; good) have the example 동호회 (club, society), 선호 (preference), 호감 (likeable), and 양호 (satisfactory, fine) but provide examples for the first three words only (cf. illustration below).
• The pronunciation of each example is written in Latin alphabet (hard to parse) although the book is targeting intermediate and advanced learners. Pronunciation in 한글 instead (like in the Naver Korean Dictionary or on KoniKorean) would be preferable.
• The book is missing (at least) two indexes: one ordering characters by their 한글 reading, and one ordering characters by their number of strokes.
• The quizzes at the end of each chapter do not add much value to the book.

Samples

Notes

KoniKorean has yet to find the perfect 한자 book for Korean learners.

Although the book does not seem to mention it, it is worth noting that 한자 is pronounced (한:짜) and not (한자).

This book by Joon Geem lists the 808 most common 한자 Chinese characters in Mandarin (hanzi), Japanese (kanji), and Korean (한자) in a compelling format. This book is particularly recommended to language learners or both Japanese and Korean or Chinese and Korean. For each of the 808 most common Chinese characters across China, Korean, and Taiwan; the author lists the corresponding simplified Chinese character, the Japanese kanji, and the Korean hanja (한자). The author also provides three vocabulary words using the corresponding Chinese character for each language, allowing comparisons between Chinese and Korean for example. 

Stronger points:

• Goes straight to the point; no convoluted explanations that are present in some books.
• Invaluable resource if you are learning two or more East Asian languages at the same time, or if you are trying to learn a new East Asian language and you are already familiar with one.
• Three indexes (Mandarin, Korean, Japanese) of all the characters in the book, ordered by their pronunciation in the corresponding language.
• QR codes pointing to the pronunciation of the characters in their native language are provided for each of the 808 Chinese characters.
• The etymology of characters is also provided, useful for making logical connections between characters.

Weaker points:

• Traditional Chinese characters (Hong Kong, Taiwan) are not provided; while these are often close to the Korean 한자 (hanja), a footnote to indicate when they differ would be appreciated.
• The examples given in the three languages (Mandarin, Korean, Japanese) do not always match each other,  but this is understandable given the limited space constraints.

Below is a sample of the page including the character 火 (화).

This book is a good buy for advanced learners of Korean who want to take their skills one step further, or for Korean learners coming from another East Asian language.

The Routledge Course in Business Korean (비즈니스 한국어) by Young-Key Kim-Renaud and Miok Pak introduces the reader to the necessary vocabulary, grammar, and cultural knowledge to navigate the complex world of doing business in South Korea. The book is structured in 15 units and 3 business cases. Each unit starts with a dialogue about a specific business situation, such as a job interview or a business trip. The dialogue is then followed by a convenient vocabulary list that includes the new words introduced by the dialogue, along with their hanja reading and their English translation (note: romanization is not provided). New grammar patterns used in the dialogue are also discussed; the grammar points in this book are rather advanced and I think most suitable for upper intermediate to advanced learners of Korean. Units end with a reading passage, its associated vocabulary, and exercises to practice the vocabulary and grammar introduced in the unit. The three business cases included consist of longer reading passages with the corresponding vocabulary.

The Routledge Course in Business Korean is a great book for professionals who are working or want to work in Korea and wish to express themselves in Korean. The grammar and vocabulary introduced in this book are more suited to the upper intermediate to advanced learner of Korean. 

The best things about the book The Routledge Course in Business Korean:

• The dialogues are more realistic than a lot of Korean books for foreigners (partly due to the more advanced content).
• Hanja (Chinese) characters are presented alongside new vocabulary, easing the reader into recognizing and learning new words based on the roots they already know.
• Romanization of the vocabulary is fortunately not provided, reducing clutter.
• Each grammar point is accompanied by several examples, making this book an appropriate companion to Korean grammar books, such as Korean: A Comprehensive Grammar.

The book has a few minor problems:

• The Routledge Course in Business Korean is not advertised as being for upper intermediate to advanced learners; beginners or lower intermediate readers would benefit little from this book.
• Some of the vocabulary (e.g., words related to factories) is hardly used in some business areas, but the reader is required to learn it in order to progress through the units. I do not see this as a major drawback, as this vocabulary is however good general knowledge to have.
• Some grammar explanations are confusing, but this is mitigated by the numerous examples provided.

Continuing Korean, Second Edition by Ross King, Jaehoon Yeon, and Insun Lee is a great textbook for upper beginner/lower intermediate learners of the Korean language. The book is composed of 12 lessons that walk readers through one or two dialogues and a reading passage, vocabulary relevant to the readings, and various grammar points.

The good points about this book:
– The progression in difficulty is very gradual, so it is hard to feel lost or overwhelmed if the lessons are studied in the right order.
– The book comes with an audio CD containing all the spoken dialogues, words and phrases, making the book a great investment for autodidacts.
– For the most part, the dialogues are relatable, making it easier to understand the context of use of specific words.
– The grammar points are well redacted and easy to understand.

Some of the negative points:
– Some of the words introduced in the vocabulary for each lesson are outdated or are reserved to specific cases that are probably unnecessary for upper-beginner/lower intermediate learners of Korean.
– A few grammar points are introduced too late in the book despite being used in the dialogues of the early chapters.

All in all, this book is a great one-stop-shop for learners of Korean wanting to take their knowledge to the next level. 

Korean: A Comprehensive Grammar by Jaehoon Yeon and Lucien Brown is one of the most useful, if not the only, comprehensive Korean grammar books available in English. The book starts with a very complete refresher on honorifics and the complex pronunciation rules of the Korean language. The rest of the book has one chapter per class of words in the Korean language. The structure of the book goes as follow:

– Chapter 1: Introduction to the Korean language 
– Chapter 2: Nouns, nominal forms, pronouns and numbers
– Chapter 3: Particles
– Chapter 4: Verbs
– Chapter 5: Auxiliary, support verbs
– Chapter 6: Clausal connectives
– Chapter 7: Modifiers
– Chapter 8: Sentence endings
– Chapter 9: Quotations
– Chapter 10: Other word classes

Some of the best thing about Korean: A Comprehensive Grammar:
– The book contains most if not all grammatical formations in Korean. 
– The book structure is very clear and straightforward, each chapter has a clear purpose.
– All speech/written registers are covered, from the most familiar sentences to very formal written language.
– There is a bilingual index at the end of the book to quickly find a specific construct.
– When relevant, the book mentions whether a pattern is common/uncommon, and more used in writing vs. speech.

The only drawback of this book is that verb patterns are only anecdotally covered, and rather hard to find (e.g., -에 대해(서) is mentioned in the section about the particle -에).

Overall, this book is highly recommended as a reference book for Korean learners of all levels.

An invaluable resource for Korean learners, Routledge's A Frequency Dictionary of Korean: Core Vocabulary for Learners catalogs the 5,000 most frequent Korean words with their pronunciation and an example sentence for each. This book is very useful for several reasons:

– Thematic vocabulary lists: 24 inserts throughout the book are dedicated to the most frequent words about a single topic. Useful to quickly memorize conversational words. See the sample page below for an example.
– An alphabetical index at the end of the book helps quickly find any Korean word present in the book.
– Each word is accompanied by a sample sentence. Really useful to understand how the word fits within a sentence and the grammatical patterns associated with them.

This book is to be used as a complement to regular studies for intermediate to advanced learners. Because the list order in this book is based on a corpus of many texts as old as 1980 and ranging from newspapers to scripts and scenarios, it can especially be helpful to review the book before a TOPIK exam to check any gap in knowledge.

Some minor problems include:

– The absence of an English-to-Korean index, which makes an English-to-Korean dictionary a necessity.
– The pronunciation of words is very hard to read because written in alphabet instead of 한글. 한글 pronunciation would have been useful for some difficult Sino-Korean words (see examples from this book).
– I noted some mistakes (e.g., word #894 담다 is translated as "wall, fence" although it is a verb).

Below is a sample page of A Frequency Dictionary of Korean: Core Vocabulary for Learners. The grey box on top is one of the 24 thematic vocabulary lists.

All in all, this dictionary is highly recommended for beginners to advanced learners of Korean.