Brown Lucien - Speed up Your Korean

This book looks at common areas of difficulty and sources of errors for learners of Korean. Although the book is designed primarily for English speakers, many of the problem areas that we look at may affect learners from all language backgrounds. Our belief is that, through the identification of these areas of difficulty, common errors can be reduced and accuracy and fluency can be promoted.

This book was inspired by the inaugural Routledge publication in this series Speed Up Your Spanish: Strategies to Avoid Common Errors by Javier Muoz-Basols, Marianne David and Olga Nez Pieiro. We were impressed by the approach taken by this book, and we were keen to apply it to Korean. However, many of the categories appearing in Speed Up Your Spanish such as gender, number and false friends do not really apply to a non-European language such as Korean. Therefore, Speed Up Your Korean has inevitably developed into a quite different book to Speed Up Your Spanish .

We focus on pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary choices that are notoriously troublesome (particularly for English speakers), typically because Korean does things in a different way and presents the learner with choices not present in their native language. We highlight differences from English and provide simple rules of thumb for correct use of the items in question. Where possible, we provide shortcuts for remembering pronunciation rules, grammar rules and vocabulary.

One of the key goals of the book is to explain differences. We have found from our own teaching experience that students often want to know what the difference is between two Korean grammatical patterns or words that appear to have similar usage or meaning. However, to date these differences have rarely been explained thoroughly in Korean teaching materials, which often present grammatical patterns linearly with no comparison offered between those of similar meaning.

between the way that Korean is written and the way it is pronounced. We provide practical tips for making your pronunciation more native-like.

The next four chapters all focus on different areas of grammar. discusses how particles (as well as word order) are used to determine the grammatical role of nouns in Korean sentences. Student will learn how to differentiate between pairs of particles that are easily confused (e.g. the subject particle / and the topic particle /), and see what happens when multiple particles occur together on the same noun.

In , students will learn about various verb endings that are known to be difficult for language learners.

covers an area of Korean grammar that is intricately related to Korean culture: the use of honorific forms. We provide useful tips to ensure that you are using the correct level of politeness and not causing any offense in your day-to-day interactions with various Korean speakers.

The final two chapters focus on vocabulary. looks at untranslatable words: Korean words that lack direct English equivalents. Through mastering the use of these words, students can make their Korean sound more natural and also display understanding of Korean culture.

covers collocation the way that particular words tend to occur together in Korean sentences. To speak Korean accurately, learning individual vocabulary items may not be sufficient. Students of Korean need to know how these vocabulary items normally combine with each other in order to produce natural, idiomatic Korean sentences.

The book contains practice activities distributed throughout the book. These activities give you the opportunity to put the theory into practice and develop your accuracy in Korean. As much as possible, the activities are designed to mimic the grammatical and lexical choices that you will encounter when you are speaking (or writing) Korean in the real world. Answers to the exercises can be found at the back of the book.

Many of the grammatical descriptions in this book rely heavily on our previous book Korean: A Comprehensive Grammar , which was published by Routledge in 2011. We would like to recommend that readers refer to this book should they require further information about the grammatical items under discussion.

Finally, we would like to thank the Academy of Korean Studies of the Republic of Korea for supporting this project. This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies (KSPS) Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2011-BAA-2104). We are also grateful to Hyojin An for her valuable assistance with the exercises.

adverbs

aspirated consonants

auxiliary verb (patterns)

bases, verb

causal connective endings

causatives

Chinese characters

collocations

commands

conditionals

connective endings

consonants

continuous tense

copula

discourse markers

double consonants

exclamations

familiar style

final consonants

first person pronouns

formal style

future tense

Hangul

honorifics

idiomatic expressions

imperatives

infinitive form

instrumental particles

intentions, expression of

intimate style

irregular verbs

kinship terms

lax consonants

loan words

location, particles of

long negation

modifiers

movement, particles of

movement, verbs of

negation

North Korea

numbers

object particle

one-shape verb endings

particles

passives

past tense

personal pronouns