i am sure no korean language textbook is perfect. but i am three lessons from the end of volume one of korean through english and the second volume awaits me on my kitchen table.
there's a lot i liked about the first book: the practicality of the dialogues (to an extent), the repetition. there are other things that bother me; namely, the very inaccurate translations from korean to english. they tell you you're saying one thing and you know you're not.
for instance: in a dialogue about making hotel reservations,
여기있어요
is translated as "Your name is here."
since 여기있어요 has been used in previous lessons, having nothing to do with reservations or names, it's not like the student doesn't know that 여기있어요 does not translate literally as "Your name is here", and since within the context of the lesson it would be completely natural to have translated the line as "Here it is"... why not just do it? why inject a completely arbitrary noun into an otherwise useful, all-purpose statement?
and then there's this one, in a dialogue about phone conversations:
말씀하세요.
which is translated as, "I'm listening."
in this case, i really didn't know what 말씀하세요 meant, but i knew it couldn't mean "I'm listening"... as i knew that no one would use an honorific in the first person. So, I asked, and sure enough, "Please speak" is more like it.
why act like "Please speak" and "I'm listening" are the same thing?
that aside, i am still using the series, as i don't know of anything better, and, again, it's gotten me this far. maybe the first of the 25 lessons in the book were studied in a class with three other students, and a korean teacher; the rest, i have done on my own.
and i have been really enjoying richard harris' roadmap to korean. this unfortunate sentance, however (from the second edition, no less) is haunting me:
Although a knowledge of han-cha does not facilitate a greater understanding of Korean grammar, it does provide the student with a dearth of new information and knowledge about two cultures steeped in thousands of years of history, tradition and culture.
i still recommend the book; i've gotten a lot out of it. it has answered in full a number of questions that, when i asked them of native korean speakers, i was told "it just is that way. there's no explanation." well, apparently, in many cases, there is.
naturally, if anybody wants to make a book recommendation, please leave a comment.