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Korean From Zero! 1: Master the Korean Language and Hangul Writing System with Integrated Workbook and Online Course
Korean from Zero! is a fun, innovative, and integrated approach to learning Korean created by professional interpreter and author of 6 text books, George Trombley, Korean linguist Reed Bullen, and native Korean speaker Sunhee Bong. Using up-to-date and easy-to-grasp grammar, Korean From Zero! is the perfect course for current students of Korean as well as absolute beginners.
Features of the
* Over 600 New Words and Expressions
* Learn to Read and Write Hangul
* Extensive Grammar
* 90 Adjectives and Verbs Detailed
* Bilingual Glossaries with Hangul and English ...and much more
Features of the
* Over 600 New Words and Expressions
* Learn to Read and Write Hangul
* Extensive Grammar
* 90 Adjectives and Verbs Detailed
* Bilingual Glossaries with Hangul and English ...and much more
- GenresLanguage
360 pages, Paperback
First published March 20, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 5, 2016
Since Korean From Zero's title doesn't actually claim anything, I'll advise people about what you are getting; for free you are essentially getting a course on the Korean language. This is going to do almost nothing in terms of acquiring a conversational level of Korean.
In Book I and audio you will get a fair number of actual recorded conversation-like short dialogs, and some question-answer exercises. Conversation virtually disappears in Books 2 and 3. Even as a Korean Language book, the visual presentation is something you better examine in the second and third books before committing yourself too deeply. The layout is probably not as organizationally straightforward for a straight beginner as the authors would like to think.
They have presented this material in the same fashion as many people often do who greatly love their subject more than the research that must go into the display of something that will work better for the less gifted than what they themselves—oblivious to the pain—had to suffer to become fully fluent masters of the tongue.
Unfortunately, instructors have learned nothing since the days of the ancient Cortana phonograph record days, and seem to have lost track of: People best learn a conversational level of language when they are presented a graded mass of meaningful dialogic material. Added to that should be extensive and copious glossed grammar and vocab notes, a morpheme-level interlinear parsing (and even a trilinear, semi-transcriptional [but not IPA-like] romanization directly under the Hangǔl), and a translation on the opposite page, with more-informal notes.
Audio should be at several levels:
Natural (rapid street-level)
Natural (formal cadence)
Slow (Word-by-word, and even morpheme-by-morpheme)
Each of these elements can be found somewhere in the vast landscape of language pedagogy. Very few seem to have what should seem to be the obvious sense of putting them all together in one 8.5 x 11 inch format. The days have long past when such a construction would be a major typographic undertaking. The most onerous tasks would be capturing quality audio by native speakers, and the painstaking matter of fully proofed, linguistically informed, romanization, which is something of an art.
Nevertheless, it's surprising that nobody has seen it through to pull such a worthy project off at least once.
In Book I and audio you will get a fair number of actual recorded conversation-like short dialogs, and some question-answer exercises. Conversation virtually disappears in Books 2 and 3. Even as a Korean Language book, the visual presentation is something you better examine in the second and third books before committing yourself too deeply. The layout is probably not as organizationally straightforward for a straight beginner as the authors would like to think.
They have presented this material in the same fashion as many people often do who greatly love their subject more than the research that must go into the display of something that will work better for the less gifted than what they themselves—oblivious to the pain—had to suffer to become fully fluent masters of the tongue.
Unfortunately, instructors have learned nothing since the days of the ancient Cortana phonograph record days, and seem to have lost track of: People best learn a conversational level of language when they are presented a graded mass of meaningful dialogic material. Added to that should be extensive and copious glossed grammar and vocab notes, a morpheme-level interlinear parsing (and even a trilinear, semi-transcriptional [but not IPA-like] romanization directly under the Hangǔl), and a translation on the opposite page, with more-informal notes.
Audio should be at several levels:
Natural (rapid street-level)
Natural (formal cadence)
Slow (Word-by-word, and even morpheme-by-morpheme)
Each of these elements can be found somewhere in the vast landscape of language pedagogy. Very few seem to have what should seem to be the obvious sense of putting them all together in one 8.5 x 11 inch format. The days have long past when such a construction would be a major typographic undertaking. The most onerous tasks would be capturing quality audio by native speakers, and the painstaking matter of fully proofed, linguistically informed, romanization, which is something of an art.
Nevertheless, it's surprising that nobody has seen it through to pull such a worthy project off at least once.
December 5, 2018
I'm so impressed that this book is such great quality considering you can get the pdf for free. I love how easy and accessible it is, and my one complaint was that you couldn't hear the words being spoken, until I realised their website has every single phrase put on as a little audio clip that you can listen to.
So now I have absolutely no bad words to say about it. Use this alongside the website and it's the perfect way to learn Korean.
So now I have absolutely no bad words to say about it. Use this alongside the website and it's the perfect way to learn Korean.
August 6, 2026
I'm a language teacher, and I've completed this book from cover to cover. I do not recommend it. For all the time you will spend studying a language, you want the best book for the job.
I picked up Korean from Zero 1 because I have Japanese from Zero 1. I got maybe halfway through that book, stopping because I moved, not because there was any issue. When learning a foreign language, immersion is one of the key tools. I really liked how Trombley et al had used immersion techniques to create a self-study language textbook. In the Japanese textbook, the characters and then the words switch from English to Japanese as you accrue the necessary knowledge. That means you're looking at mixed characters and then mixed words for a gradual but rapid slide into full immersion. That includes the instructions, which are also in Japanese as soon as you've learned the necessary components. I really liked that technique.
The Korean textbook is similar but different, which makes sense because Korean is different. However, in the Korean textbook, the instructions remain in English throughout the book. The only written integration is teaching hangul in the opening chapter and then using only hangul for Korean words thereafter. Some reviewers criticize this approach, but it's a necessity for immersion. Your goal is to think in Korean. You want to think of Korean sounds. You don't want to visualize some English version that is at best an approximation to the Korean goal.
The first really big problem with this textbook, though, is that Korean pronunciation isn't as simple as Japanese pronunciation. Nevertheless, the textbook doesn't take the additional time or space to address that issue. Unlike the Japanese, students of Korean will need to play the sound clip on every single word and sentence provided because the sounds DO NOT match the written information. The sound blending, sound changes, and various elisions affect every word, phrase, or sentence as the final sound depends on the sounds next to it (and particle usage in Korean means a lot of little sounds are inserted around words to tell you what that word is doing grammatically), so when students don't understand the methodology in those sound changes, then a very essential element is missing. Trombley offered a few sound rules. Then he made some cop-out statement like even Koreans can't explain why about the sounds. That's ridiculous! Your average American, also, couldn't explain the reasons for the sounds in our language, but linguists study precisely that, and language textbooks teach linguistics! I know I'll need to buy another book on Korean pronunciation specifically because this one was a huge failure there. And no matter how well I've studied the content of the book, if I don't understand and can't emulate the sounds, then I will neither be able to understand spoken Korean, nor will I be able to be understood as I speak Korean myself.
So, the sound clips are essential because only by playing the sound clip will you know how any hangul or word combination sounds, and a large quantity of the sound files are missing! Not only are entire sections of sound missing, but it's not uncommon at all for the spoken sentence not to match the written sentence, so a novice student has to figure out what are sound changes, what are missing words, and what are changed words. Additionally, the author states that he sometimes added words to more closely mimic the expectations of English. (Don't do this, language teachers! If we're not studying English, then this isn't about English.) Therefore, I wonder if the words used in the native audio clips are corrections or more accurate versions of the author's sentences, or if we're just seeing mixed up drafts of the textbook itself so that the audio and written forms so often don't match.
There are so many mistakes in this textbook, and every single mistake wastes your precious time. If the answer book says something different than what I wrote, then I go back to the text to see what I might have misunderstood. If my answer perfectly matches what they taught, then I go back to the answer key to see if they're trying to teach me some new concept in my first iteration of practicing the concept they just taught. Gradually, though, I wasted less and less time because I would more quickly assume that I have discovered yet another error in the book. A noun was replaced. A verb was replaced. Even the English has mistakes in it.
Another big irritation was trying to study the conversational text and beating myself up over how many words I couldn't remember or couldn't find--only to discover words that hadn't even been taught yet! I didn't know that word because it was taught in the next chapter. Then I'd backtrack and write the later page number next to where I'd written the question mark. Every single moment like this is a rock thrown at a student's confidence. Maybe we should just stop.
And with every known mistake that I encounter, I wonder how many unknown mistakes I've passed up. How many words or grammatical rules am I memorizing that are actually ALSO mistakes? How can I have confidence in a textbook that I know is absolutely riddled with errors?
And yet I spent A LOT of my life going through this textbook. I was sick, and I gave up once when I was near the end, so I had to later start over at the beginning and do the entire thing over again to catch up to where I was. Then I could see how very many mistakes were clustered together right at the point when I'd decided that I was too sick to continue. It wasn't even me!
The speed of this textbook is also a bit laughable. Multiple tenses and conditionals are all introduced in a single chapter. They've got a lot of confidence in students' abilities or else they haven't studied a language in so long that they don't understand that it's too much at once. With so many verbs and grammatical topics brought up each chapter, students may not even have one single sentence example of a verb conjugated into each of the tenses that have been taught. Of course, within the workbook section students will not have a chance to write a sample sentence for each of the verbs introduced in each chapter and certainly not to sample them in each of the tenses covered. A standard university class would include so much more in the way of practice exercises to fully understand the conjugations and other grammatical concepts covered. As a teacher myself, I copied out every sample sentence, filling pages of notebook, because the actual workbook section is much too minimal. At best, you might consider Korean from Zero 1 to be a crash course designed to cram a lot of information into a short period of time as its main goal with anything too complicated, like pronunciation, skipped almost entirely.
For studying Korean, you can find a better source. Language textbooks should not contain a single editing mistake. The absolute piles of mistakes in this one are above and beyond egregious. My error-packed edition claims to be the 5th edition. But we can all rest easy because someone decided that what the book really needed was for the cover illustration to triple the bust size, etc. of the woman on it. Gross.
I picked up Korean from Zero 1 because I have Japanese from Zero 1. I got maybe halfway through that book, stopping because I moved, not because there was any issue. When learning a foreign language, immersion is one of the key tools. I really liked how Trombley et al had used immersion techniques to create a self-study language textbook. In the Japanese textbook, the characters and then the words switch from English to Japanese as you accrue the necessary knowledge. That means you're looking at mixed characters and then mixed words for a gradual but rapid slide into full immersion. That includes the instructions, which are also in Japanese as soon as you've learned the necessary components. I really liked that technique.
The Korean textbook is similar but different, which makes sense because Korean is different. However, in the Korean textbook, the instructions remain in English throughout the book. The only written integration is teaching hangul in the opening chapter and then using only hangul for Korean words thereafter. Some reviewers criticize this approach, but it's a necessity for immersion. Your goal is to think in Korean. You want to think of Korean sounds. You don't want to visualize some English version that is at best an approximation to the Korean goal.
The first really big problem with this textbook, though, is that Korean pronunciation isn't as simple as Japanese pronunciation. Nevertheless, the textbook doesn't take the additional time or space to address that issue. Unlike the Japanese, students of Korean will need to play the sound clip on every single word and sentence provided because the sounds DO NOT match the written information. The sound blending, sound changes, and various elisions affect every word, phrase, or sentence as the final sound depends on the sounds next to it (and particle usage in Korean means a lot of little sounds are inserted around words to tell you what that word is doing grammatically), so when students don't understand the methodology in those sound changes, then a very essential element is missing. Trombley offered a few sound rules. Then he made some cop-out statement like even Koreans can't explain why about the sounds. That's ridiculous! Your average American, also, couldn't explain the reasons for the sounds in our language, but linguists study precisely that, and language textbooks teach linguistics! I know I'll need to buy another book on Korean pronunciation specifically because this one was a huge failure there. And no matter how well I've studied the content of the book, if I don't understand and can't emulate the sounds, then I will neither be able to understand spoken Korean, nor will I be able to be understood as I speak Korean myself.
So, the sound clips are essential because only by playing the sound clip will you know how any hangul or word combination sounds, and a large quantity of the sound files are missing! Not only are entire sections of sound missing, but it's not uncommon at all for the spoken sentence not to match the written sentence, so a novice student has to figure out what are sound changes, what are missing words, and what are changed words. Additionally, the author states that he sometimes added words to more closely mimic the expectations of English. (Don't do this, language teachers! If we're not studying English, then this isn't about English.) Therefore, I wonder if the words used in the native audio clips are corrections or more accurate versions of the author's sentences, or if we're just seeing mixed up drafts of the textbook itself so that the audio and written forms so often don't match.
There are so many mistakes in this textbook, and every single mistake wastes your precious time. If the answer book says something different than what I wrote, then I go back to the text to see what I might have misunderstood. If my answer perfectly matches what they taught, then I go back to the answer key to see if they're trying to teach me some new concept in my first iteration of practicing the concept they just taught. Gradually, though, I wasted less and less time because I would more quickly assume that I have discovered yet another error in the book. A noun was replaced. A verb was replaced. Even the English has mistakes in it.
Another big irritation was trying to study the conversational text and beating myself up over how many words I couldn't remember or couldn't find--only to discover words that hadn't even been taught yet! I didn't know that word because it was taught in the next chapter. Then I'd backtrack and write the later page number next to where I'd written the question mark. Every single moment like this is a rock thrown at a student's confidence. Maybe we should just stop.
And with every known mistake that I encounter, I wonder how many unknown mistakes I've passed up. How many words or grammatical rules am I memorizing that are actually ALSO mistakes? How can I have confidence in a textbook that I know is absolutely riddled with errors?
And yet I spent A LOT of my life going through this textbook. I was sick, and I gave up once when I was near the end, so I had to later start over at the beginning and do the entire thing over again to catch up to where I was. Then I could see how very many mistakes were clustered together right at the point when I'd decided that I was too sick to continue. It wasn't even me!
The speed of this textbook is also a bit laughable. Multiple tenses and conditionals are all introduced in a single chapter. They've got a lot of confidence in students' abilities or else they haven't studied a language in so long that they don't understand that it's too much at once. With so many verbs and grammatical topics brought up each chapter, students may not even have one single sentence example of a verb conjugated into each of the tenses that have been taught. Of course, within the workbook section students will not have a chance to write a sample sentence for each of the verbs introduced in each chapter and certainly not to sample them in each of the tenses covered. A standard university class would include so much more in the way of practice exercises to fully understand the conjugations and other grammatical concepts covered. As a teacher myself, I copied out every sample sentence, filling pages of notebook, because the actual workbook section is much too minimal. At best, you might consider Korean from Zero 1 to be a crash course designed to cram a lot of information into a short period of time as its main goal with anything too complicated, like pronunciation, skipped almost entirely.
For studying Korean, you can find a better source. Language textbooks should not contain a single editing mistake. The absolute piles of mistakes in this one are above and beyond egregious. My error-packed edition claims to be the 5th edition. But we can all rest easy because someone decided that what the book really needed was for the cover illustration to triple the bust size, etc. of the woman on it. Gross.
July 8, 2017
This hovered at a 4-5 star for me.
While very similar to the Japanese from Zero series. It was a lot harder for me to read so I took off a star.
Korean has a lot of different spellings and rules unlike Japanese so the alphabet is a bit harder to grasp.
I enjoyed trying to sound of the word though and finding out that I had heard the word before and therefore could pronounce it properly.
I will definitely continue with this book but not till I'm closer to 95% certain of the alphabet! Lol. :)
While very similar to the Japanese from Zero series. It was a lot harder for me to read so I took off a star.
Korean has a lot of different spellings and rules unlike Japanese so the alphabet is a bit harder to grasp.
I enjoyed trying to sound of the word though and finding out that I had heard the word before and therefore could pronounce it properly.
I will definitely continue with this book but not till I'm closer to 95% certain of the alphabet! Lol. :)
March 3, 2022
It is a pretty good book and somewhat easy to understand. The only thing is that you have to have some understanding and basic knowledge of the Korean Language to be able to progress through the book. Although in the answer sheet there was a typo for a response. It said "아니요, 저것은 자전거예요." The answer section said this translated to "No, it is a bus" but the word "자전거" means bicycle. This might only be the case for my specific book but it was still a typo. Despite this though, I would reccomend to someone who was wanting to learn korean and was already into the culture.
July 31, 2022
Fantastic book. Easy to read with great explanations in bite size pieces so it's not too overwhelming when learning a new grammar point and such.
This is a textbook and workbook in one. It has an answer key at the back so handy if you are self learning like I am. I have a few other Korean learning textbooks but I found this one the easiest to follow.
No glossy pics or pages but still a great book. There is a few typos in the book but the newer versions I think have been updated.
Highly recommend if you are self studying.
Loved it...
This is a textbook and workbook in one. It has an answer key at the back so handy if you are self learning like I am. I have a few other Korean learning textbooks but I found this one the easiest to follow.
No glossy pics or pages but still a great book. There is a few typos in the book but the newer versions I think have been updated.
Highly recommend if you are self studying.
Loved it...
August 31, 2018
정말 재미있는데 좀 어려워요
November 1, 2020
It was a really amazing textbook! It had so much information and at the same time, it was all very beautifully presented, in a non-threatening way! I found it a pleasure to study from.
September 1, 2020
2.5 Please read my review at Coffee and Ramblings
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews