Colloquial Korean - My thoughts after finishing the book

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I’ve just finished Colloquial Korean and would like to give my thoughts on the book.

This is not the first Colloquial course that I have used, and it ressembles every other Colloquial course which I have tried.

Before I used this course, I used Assimil Korean and FLR Korean 1 and of course LingQ.

I typed all the Colloquial lessons into LingQ, studied each lesson for 30 minutes a day, reading/listening the majority of the time.

Pros:
Two dialogues + Reading passage for every lesson
Grammar explanations come with several example sentences
Clear audio

Cons:
Some of the font for the Hangul can be confusing(mainly the letters ㅜ ㅗ ㅡ)
No romanization (which could help beginners)
Grammar is way too complex to understand at the beginning (could be a benefit to those who like it)
After the first 10 lessons, you start to learn vocab that you might never use (such as the word for “radiator”)
You have to edit the audio files if you want Korean only
Somewhat boring dialogues

*However, some of the pros or cons could be switched depending on people’s preferences, this is only my opinion

Overall, I feel I retained probably 75% of the vocab that was in the course, however I still find it hard to understand some of the grammar points, even after finishing the book.

Would I recommend? Yes I would recommend this book, especially over Assimil Korean or FLR Korean 1 for a beginner.

If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to post below.

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“Grammar is way too complex to understand at the beginning (could be a benefit to those who like it)”

This annoys the living piss out of me with japanese. I just want gradually more complex sentence with translations and what each word does or means… Briefly.

Instead, you can’t find a single book that is without multi paragraph or page long explanations of “copulas”, “Volitional form”, predicate, and “explanation of that or that exception”.

I truly believe that both Korean and Japanese wouldn’t be as difficult if a pattern based learning path was better mapped out for the western learner.

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I believe most learners would like full translations + individual word translations, however those books are hard to find. I believe the pattern method could work, which is why Steve usually has many translated so that he can use them at LingQ.

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