Amazon Customer

Decent Book, but avoid the audiobook version.

Revisado: 05-23-24

Overall, this book was a very useful tool for Korean reading practice. For reference, I am a low B1 and the difficulty was just right for me. One of the things that I liked the most about this book was that they introduced a lot of grammatical concepts slowly and then repeated those concepts over and over so that I could learn them. Just make sure to look up a grammar form if you don't understand it, as the book gives no explanations. Now for the cons...

The audiobook portion has many issues. The female voice actress (Sharon Young Mi Kwan) did a fantastic job, but the male voice actor (June Yoon) was disappointing. At first, he was speaking so slowly that he was hard to understand. Then he started speaking so fast that it sounded unnatural, as if he was just trying to finish the job as fast as possible. It sounded very unprofessional and made it difficult to understand. Also both actors pronounced 네 (your) and 네가 the same as 내 and 내가, instead of pronouncing them as 니 and 니가 (which is the way 99.9% of the population says it). It was very distracting as all four words are used very frequently in this book. If they were worried about pronouncing 네가 "correctly" like an elitist, then why did they pronounce 그러길 바라 as 그러길 바래? Finally, the audio quality was bad, like it was too heavily compressed. I had to listen to it on my crappy phone speakers so that I couldn't notice it.

As for the book itself, I would have preferred a more direct translation from Korean to English. You will have to use a translator or dictionary often, because the English "translations" are quite loose. The book also used the phrase 천만에요 quite heavily. But from what I have read, that phrase really isn't used any more. How many other antiquated phrases did I learn without realizing it?

Even though it has some issues, I still recommend buying this book as it is a useful learning tool. Just save yourself some money and avoid the audiobook version.

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