Basic Korean Grammar

Learn the Grammar You Need to Speak Correctly

Tuttle Publishing
Soohee Kim, Emily Curtis, Haewon Cho
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Basic Korean Grammar covers all the basic sentence structures, verbal forms and idiomatic expressions taught in the first two years of a high school or college level Korean language course.

This book is specifically designed to help the following learners:

  • Anyone taking a beginning or intermediate level Korean language course
  • Adult learners who are studying Korean on their own or with a tutor
  • Anyone who has studied Korean previously and now wishes to review and brush-up
  • Heritage learners who speak a bit of Korean but want to speak it more correctly

Whether readers are just beginning to learn Korean, brushing-up after a hiatus, or striving to finesse their rudimentary knowledge, Basic Korean Grammar offers an accessible and straightforward overview of the language. Created by a team of professional linguists, each of the book's nine chapters highlights a different essential concept, from particles to honorifics to complex sentence constructions and more. A compact alternative to unwieldy textbooks, this volume presents Korean words and sentences in both Hangeul script and Romanized form (with English translations), charts and examples demonstrating usage in a variety of contexts, and numerous helpful exercises to reinforce each lesson.

Teachers seeking extensive review materials for their students will find this book extremely useful. Students can use it as a reference and for systematic review later to refresh their memory and have a complete overview without referring to a thick textbook.

Contributor Bio

Soohee Kim has a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Washington. Her professional interests include the historical development of the Korean language and lexicon, the role of grammatical knowledge in language learning, and teaching beginning and heritage learners. She is the primary author of the four-volume college-level Korean textbook series You Speak Korean!

Emily Curtis holds doctorates in Linguistics (PhD) and Education (EdD) from the University of Washington. Her research interests are in phonetics, phonology, and general linguistics and defining how metalinguistic knowledge benefits learners. She teaches various linguistics courses and has made contributions to the fields of Korean language pedagogy, morphological awareness and cross-cultural communication. She is a co-author of You Speak Korean!

Haewon Cho has taught Korean language courses for the past 15 years at the University of Washington, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. She holds M.A. degrees in Linguistics and ESL from the University of Washington. She is a co-author of You Speak Korean! and her interests include language assessment, curriculum development and teaching with technology as well as the teaching of business language.