Practical Korean ─ Your Guide to Speaking Korean Quickly and Effortlessly in a Few Hours

Planning a short visit to Korea? Don't forget to include a copy of Practical Korean! This book by Samuel E. Martin, renowned Asian language expert and professor emeritus at Yale University, provides a "quick" and successful approach to speaking Korean.

Recently updated to reflect current conversational Korean usage and vocabulary, this book is designed to be concise, fun, and useful for beginners without any previous knowledge of the language. Taking a functional approach to Korean language learning, Practical Korean provides all the basics you need, beginning with correct pronunciation and a few key grammar points in the very first page, followed by 47 short lessons which include everyday examples that reinforce key vocabulary and proper sentence patterns. From "Names and Greetings" to "Casual Remarks Using -ji yo", people who are only visiting or staying in Korea for a short time will quickly gain confidence to get around and express themselves in simple conversational Korean. Both Hangul, the native alphabet of the Korean language, and standard romanization system used in South Korea today are also incorporated throughout the book.

Samuel E. Martin received his undergraduate degree and master's degree in Oriental languages from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in linguistics from Yale University. He is the author of numerous books and papers on Japanese and Korean, including the definitive A Reference Grammar of Japanese and A Reference Grammar of Korean.