Korean Short Stories for Beginners: 20 Captivating Short Stories to Learn Korean & Grow Your Vocabulary the Fun Way! (Easy Korean Stories) Paperback – September 29, 2020

Once again Lingo Mastery has come to the rescue, making Korean more accessible to a wider population. In the Introductory Note the goal is stated well: ‘We’ve written this book to cover an important issue that seems to affect every new learner of the Korean tongue – a lack of helpful reading material. While in English you may encounter tons (or gigabytes, in our modern times) of easy and accessible learning material, in Korean you will usually and promptly be given tough literature to read by your teachers, and you will soon find yourself consulting your dictionary more than you’d want to. Eventually, you’ll find yourself bored and uninterested in continuing, and your initially positive outlook may soon turn sour. Our goal with this book will be to supply you with useful, entertaining, helpful and challenging material that will no only allow you to learn the language but also help you pass the time and make the experience less formal and more fun…’After their success teaching Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, and Turkish, now they continue in teaching Korean! And it works. To make the Korean – Hangul - characters accessible, transcriptions are provided in the form of transliteration and conventional signs used for transcription. Each of the twenty stories follows the pattern Summary of the story, Vocabulary Questions about the story, and Answers. Or as the authors state, ‘Each story will tell a different tale involving unique, deep characters with their own personalities and conflicts, while ensuring that you understand the objective of the particular language device in Korean Verbs, Pronouns, Nouns, Directions, Time and Date: all of it will be covered in this Basic-level book for Beginners. At no point will we introduce concepts too difficult for you to grasp, and any complicated vocabulary will be studied at the end of each story.’The technique is solid and the stories are entertaining. This is a very fine introduction to Korean language that may arise when you visit Korea or simply conversing and understand the Korean population here at home. This book is appropriate for all age levels, and a book much needed at this time in our national status! Grady Harp, October 20

I've been looking for something exactly like this for a long time, so I'm really glad I came across this in r/Korean.The book's very comprehensive — with the full Korean text, then paragraph by paragraph translations, then a vocabulary list, summary, and even a little post test, etc. — so I think even early beginners could benefit from it.The stories are interesting too. They're beginner level for sure, but not boring, and it's definitely easier to learn new words when read in context. For grammar, you have to remember that some sentence structures in stories are different from normal speech, but other than that you're golden.If I could ask for more, it would be nice to have an audiobook version. For upper beginners or intermediate learners, it might be interesting to have definitions in Korean too. The book focuses on vocabulary, so some grammar explanations would make it absolutely perfect, though I know that'll take a whole lot of work.In conclusion, I'm very happy with the book. It's a great addition to one's Korean learning arsenal.

Having no experience in Korean I've spent the past year looking at all the resources available. I really like the Lingo Mastery Korean books. I have them all! With Audible you get to listen along as you read. I also bought the physical book to follow and mark up. Great for hearing the sounds, recognizing words and getting a feel for how sentences flow in Korean. The stories are in both English and Korean which is helpful in knowing the sentence structure to get the concept across. Word lists also included. I like how the learning comes in several forms.

The short stories are, of course, in Korean. There are 20 stories in Korean that have their own vocabulary, questions to each story and an answer sheet for them. The 20 stories also have the English translation, and can be read in Korean only or Korean with English, and a summary at the end of the story. Use the book to study sentence structures, grammatical rules and verb conjugations, and new vocabulary words.

****I received an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review****Let me start off by saying that this is a valuable resource for advanced beginners as well as intermediate learners of Korean. Apart from practicing your reading (and speaking) skills, it also develops your comprehension skills thanks to the questions asked after each story. I also appreciate the translation after the original story in Korean, and the summary, which introduces an aspect of Korean culture that was mentioned in the story.To be honest, I have not finished the book, simply because I am taking my time going through each story. There's a lot to gain from using this beginner storybook to deepen your Korean. For me, other than the new vocabulary, I ( a confessed grammar nerd) also notice sentence structures I'm unfamiliar with and look it up to see the correct usage (I actually think including new sentence structures used after each story would push it up to a five star for me tbh). This is not a book to be rushed through, in order to get the maximum benefits. It would have also been good if there was an audio component where one could ensure that they are pronouncing each word correctly, if they (like me) are using it as speaking practice, but it would probably drive up the price point.This is my second Lingo Mastery book on the Korean language so far, and I am enjoying and appreciate the level of quality received in these books for such an affordable price. I would wholeheartedly recommend their books to anyone seeking to continue their study of Korean.