Roadmap to Korean by Richard Harris takes a look at learning Korean from a historical, cultural, and pop linguistic point of view. There are twenty-two chapters, five sections and an extensive appendices that combined make this a book that the Korean language student will find invaluable. The value doesn’t come from teaching you Korean as that is not what Harris is trying to do, but rather from providing a new perspective and insight into learning Korean and finding avenues to overcome obstacles and difficulties. ESL teachers, linguistics students, and those with a passing interest in Korea will find the book interesting for it’s insight into the Korean mind, language difficulties and the cultural explanaitions presented as well as brief history of Korea as it pertains to language.

The historical background about King Sejong and the creation of the Korean wriitng system is well written and contains information that I was unaware of even after living in Korea for over seven years. It is true that learning to read & write Korean is as easy as King Sejong suggested , I taught myself to read & write in one day with a book and some cassettes (of course it took some time before I could write & read with speed)

One interesting new fact is the story behind the Korean name for the United States, 미국­ (美國). Harris debunks one of the myths about the origin of the name coming from the idea that “people in Chinsa and Korea thiank that Americans are ‘beautiful’ people. It does not come from this but the word has a more linguistic origin mixed in with bits from Japanese occupation. I won’t spoil the surprise, you can find the answer on page seven.

Harris continually spices up his book with interesting and amusing personal anecdotes that will resonate with anyone who has lived in Korea or any foreign country. The most interesting stories do not deal with failure of communicative competence but rather with pragmatic breakdowns as the following, from page 119-120, demonstrates.

When I first moved to SEoul and found my own place, I naturally had a landlady, jee-joo-een (집주ì?¸), as opposed to a landlord, like almost every other tenant in this country. My landlady was particularly gragarious and we would woften try tand strike up a conversation in my limited Korean. At the time, I was studying the language but still did not have a firm grasp on addressing people, I, like many before me, refused to believe that I couldn’t use the pronoun ‘you’ at will. As a result, I often said tang-sheen (ë‹¹ì‹ ) to my landlady when asking her a question. I could tell that she was never really comfortable with my use of it, but until I was told how awkward I sounded from close frieds, I kept up with it. ‘Just drop the subject and speak to her woithout one,’ my friends urged me.

‘No subject when speaking to my landlady?’ I asked back.

‘Yeah, you don’t need it they assured me. ‘If you want to call her anything call her a-joo=maw-nee (아주머니),’ they went on.

‘So let me get this straight,’ I fired back. ‘I can refer to my landlady in teh third person when talking with her directly, but I can’t refer to her in the second person when talking with her.’

‘Right.’

‘Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for clearing that up,’ I said as I took a dep breath.

To this day I still get a chuckle out of the fact that I was making someone uncomfortable by using the respectble pronoun ‘you.’

Some other good ones include The Difficulty of Speaking with Parents page 193, Ask me After Class page 207, bad boy page 74 in which Harris accidently calls his friend’s wife a bitch, and my personal favorite because I have a story that is almost word for word the same is First Impressions Last a Lifetime page 104.

valuable resources

There are a number of valuable resources for the Korean langauge student within this book other than the background and sociological factors that hinder or aid language acquistion. The best resources include an explanation of why context is more important in Korean than it is in English and the need to be indirect - Harris doesn’t mention this but it also will help when it is time to consider your conversation partners Ki-bun (기분).  Common difficult grammar hurdles are explained in a simple yet engaging manner that will help the newcomer to the language navigate these obstacles more quickly than I did (where was this book when I started to learn Korean?). Some examples include understanding the very subtle but important distinction between subject and topic markers and various verb conjugations and the levels of formality. Did you know that there are 23 different ways to ask do you know?

One aspect that Harris discusses at length is the need to learn Chinese words and the corresponding han-cha (한자) 韓å­?, which I initially rejected and my wife chastised me for it. Later in my Korean learning career I discovered how important this is. How I wish I had read Roadmap to Korean at that time. Harris’s explanation is easy to read and even extends into advice on how to use a dictionary both for han-cha as well as for words written in the regular Korean script.

One of the most interesting, and useful chapters if you should marry a Korean, is the chapter on family vocabulary. This chapter ends with a list of words that denote familial relationships. This list is four pages long, but extremely valuable. Another useful chapter deals with rice. This chapter also ends with a list of words about rice. 28 words related to rice, 19 of which are different ways to say rice itself depending on a number of different factors.

In the end all I can is that this book is a wealth of information that the learner of Korean and others with a general interest in languages and Korea will enjoy reading.

I also posted this on the book review site with a link to amazon.