A Free Korean Language Course

Chris — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 01:39:37 +0000

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).

Update: You can find the Level Two course here!

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A Free Korean Language Course