Darkmistress's Full Review: Jane Wightwick - Your First 100 Words in Korean: B...
A friend recommended Your First 100 Words In Korean not long before we decided to come here. She had used the series for Swedish and found it to be very helpful. Except that she already knew what the vowels sounded like. Properly pronouncing vowels can make or break most languages and Korean has 10 vowels out of 24 letters. I spend a lot of time breaking the kids of pronouncing the silent ‘e’ at the end of words because every Korean word ends in a vowel sound. Which leads me to the critical problem with this book. The vowels? They’re wrong.
It looks like a great book. It starts with an explanation of how Korean words work. Then it is divided by topic:
Around the home
Clothes
Around town
Countryside
Opposites
Animals
Parts of the body
Useful expressions
The topics are all pretty logical and each has a page of vocabulary, in English and Hangul, accompanied by ok pictures of the item. Then there are a couple of pages of activities so that you can use the words. They mix English, Hangul and Hanja (writing) supposedly so you can learn how the Hanja letters are pronounced within the word and so you can sound out things when you see signs. The last chapter is called a review section, but it’s actually just the answers to the worksheets. And then there’s a section of flashcards that you can cut out. Those are on nice heavy cardstock so they can take a lot of abuse.
Of course, in the final days before leaving for Korea I had no time to play with the book. I got over here and a couple of months passed before I really started with the book. And that’s how I ended up with it on the subway having the very nice, and very fluent English speaking, Korean gentleman correcting my cards. Did I mention that the Korean alphabet is almost half vowels? Did I mention that it wasn’t just the vowels that were wrong? By my count my very nice gentleman corrected about half the letters in the alphabet. This was after we had been working at this for a month. No wonder everyone kept looking at us like we were speaking a foreign language when we tried to use our Korean. We certainly weren’t speaking Korean. This brought a screeching halt to our language acquisition.
The only way I can recommend this book is if you promise me that you are planning to have a Korean correct all the letter pronunciations. Or if you’re only interested in reading Korean. If you happen to be working with a Korean to learn the language, this would be a great book. I have actually used some of the worksheets in class with the kids because they go both ways. It’s too bad too because the flashcards in the back are very nice too.
Your First 100 Words in Korean removes all the intimidation from learning a language that uses a non-Roman alphabet or script. Learners are shown how ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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