College Korean (review)

234BOOK REVIEWS book's modest scope ensures that it is small, compact, and convenient to use. It is also user-friendly, clearly printed, logically organized, light in weight, and well bound. Nahm deserves thanks for producing this work, particularly in view of the paucity of materials on Korea easily accessible to nonspecialists in the United States—a problem discussed recently at an East-West Center workshop for high-school and college teachers of Asian studies. Within the limits of its restricted focus, it provides a clearly written, factually reliable compendium of major developments in South Korea since 1948. Perhaps it will inspire others to produce additional badly needed resources for the study of Korea. Michael J. Seth University of Hawai'i at Mänoa College Korean, by Michael C. Rogers, Clare You, and Kyungnyun K. Richards. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. xiv + 363 pp. $30.00, paper. A recent evaluation of seven current textbooks for teaching Korean, including five either first published or newly revised in 1992, found that none came close to meeting the fundamental requirement of giving clear and accurate—if not necessarily comprehensive—explanations that the students can understand without the teacher's help and that need not be unlearned at a later date (Lee 1993). College Korean (CK), which was not among those seven texts evaluated earlier, differs from the others in that the principal author is a "base native instructor" who knows what it is to learn the target language as a foreign language and who knows what it is to be a foreigner in the target culture (to use Eleanor Jorden's terms). However, the principal author does not take full benefit of that potential advantage, presumably due to the urgent need to produce a decent textbook as soon as possible (p. ix). Presumably for the same reason, CK is also extremely skimpy. Since Korean (along with Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese) is designated one of the most difficult languages by the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, it requires much more extensive teaching and learning materials, including dialogues, explanations of grammar and culture , and exercises. "Target native instructors" may sometimes overlook implicit linguistic or cultural knowledge learned in childhood. CK shows some of the benefits of the often more explicit awareness of a base native instructor. Careful thought went into explaining the sociolinguistics of second-person BOOK REVIEWS235 terms of address, humble words, and honorific words. The pragmatics of how to say "Let's plan to..." in Lesson 18 (L18) is also carefully explained. Culturally loaded words such as maum 'heart, mind, spirit, personality ' (L26) are well presented. (All Korean words are cited in Yale romanization in this review.) The introduction of Korean verbs with multiple translations in English, such as aphuta, pota, hata, twuta, cata, and cista (L21), also improves on some other textbooks. The copula -ita is aptly translated 'to equal' (L2) alongside its usual polysemous English gloss 'to be'. The text also cautions that English to be, unlike Korean -ita, also means 'to exist' or 'to stay', which are expressed by issta in Korean. CK rightfully introduces the Korean hankul writing system from the beginning. The motivation is described as pedagogic: hankul is easy to learn. But there is also a linguistic reason: Korean is not easy to romanize. As a result, there are a number of competing systems, all of which require additional learning to achieve less-than-satisfactory results. The decision to introduce Sino-Korean (S-K) characters (banca) in a beginning text is also commendable, particularly for students whose goal is to read materials written in a mixture of hankul and hanca. From L7 on, about six to ten new characters are introduced each lesson, for a total of 142. However, the authors allow individual instructors to ignore the hanca if they wish. In order to allow this possibility, the characters are presented very superficially: they appear nowhere but in the vocabulary section and nothing but their stroke order is introduced. If hanca are to be introduced at all, they should be presented in a learnable manner. They should be introduced in dialogues and readings (perhaps with hankul equivalents placed underneath each character so they...