Julie Damron

I am a bit undecided on my rating. Perhaps somewhere between a 3 and a 4. There are several problems that need to be rectified with a good edit and revision.

First, for me, as an intermediate to high intermediate speaker, I found that the vocabulary lists after each story were inadequate. The words that needed to be defined/translated from the story were not listed so I had to resort to the Korean Naver dictionary app to find them. The other problem was that basic vocabulary words that an show more intermediate speaker would know by this point were listed needlessly.

Second, the Korean word transliterations are old and inaccurate many times and give the reading learner an inaccurate idea of the pronunciation of the word. Korea has a standardized transliteration system that is now in use that is much better.

Third, there are several incorrect vocabulary translations that need to be corrected though this is not a major problem. The translations of the stories themselves seemed to be pretty true to the original Korean text, however, there was inconsistency in the level of the stories. Going back to my first point about vocabulary, there were some later, long stories that really needed more build up of defined vocabulary words from all of the previous stories. There were a couple of times I felt like I was jumping from a lower intermediate level to an advanced level in the next story and then down again to intermediate in the next.

Finally, the voice of the Korean reader on the cd is child-like, non-standard pronunciation and unpleasant to listen to. I would try to listen to it in my car as part of a repetitive listening program but became so annoyed by the speaker's voice that I eventually removed it from the cd rotation. I strongly suggest re-recording the cd with any future editions of this book.

I will say this though, the Korean stories are mostly tales from Korean folklore and really give you an insight into Korean culture and the historical mindset. I had a real breakthrough with this book as I have at this point become fluent enough to read a story through with only minimal word look-up. I relied on Quizlet as I got to the longer stories at the end to help remember and build vocabulary. show less