Colloquial Korean: The Complete Course for Beginners (New Edition) is the updated Korean volume from this popular series of language books designed for private study. This new version includes some important revisions from the first edition (In-Seok Kim, 1996). However, the book still contains notable weaknesses as an introductory Korean text.

Two important revisions from the first edition have improved the accessibility and relevance of Colloquial Korean. Firstly, while retaining the Korean Hangul script, the text now contains Romanization of all dialogues. This represents a break from traditional practices in Korean language pedagogy, where Romanization is often seen as superfluous. The reason for this is the assumed simplicity of Hangul, which is viewed with pride in the South Korean national consciousness as being the most scientific and easiest to learn script and also one of the nation's finest inventions (King, Language and National Identity in Asia, Oxford: OUP, 2007). This traditional position, however, ignores the fact that ab initio learners may take time to acquire the at times similar geometric shapes of Hangul and, in particular, to appropriate the various rules of assimilation and other complex pronunciation adjustments. Regarding the latter in particular, the inclusion in Colloquial Korean of a new section dealing with these adjustments (pp. 20–22) works further to address the difficulties of learning Korean script and pronunciation at beginner levels. Moreover, the inclusion of Romanization makes practical sense in a self-study guide, as it allows readers to browse the book in a more casual way without the burden of learning the script first, no matter how “easy” the script in question might be.

The second welcome revision is the adoption of a more “conversational” register of speech styles. Korean contains as many as six different styles – verb endings from which the speaker must choose to index his/her relationship with the hearer (relative age and/or status, degree of intimacy, etc.). Textbook designers are thus left with the perennial problem of deciding which of these styles should be applied as the primary register and how and when further styles should be introduced. Whereas the first edition applied the highly formal “deferential” –(sǔ)mnida style as the primary register, the second edition mostly features the “polite” –a/ŏyo. This second style, although more casual than the first, is still “polite” enough in most contexts and, unlike the “deferential” does not run the risk of sounding too formal or “stuffy”. In line with the observations of Yeon (1996, in Korean Language Education), the choice of the “polite” –a/ŏyo is also preferable because of its high frequency in contemporary Korean. In addition, unlike the first edition of Colloquial Korean (or the majority of ab initio Korean texts), this second edition introduces non-honorific speech styles, often referred to as panmal (lit. “half-speech”). This represents a welcome development since, as pointed out by Brown (Language, Culture and Curriculum, 23/11, 2010), these styles are too often under-emphasized in Korean pedagogy despite the fact that learners need to use them with the intimate friends and family members who often represent their first opportunities to practise Korean.

Despite these improvements, the current reviewer has two reservations regarding the suitability of this book as an introductory Korean text, particularly for self-study. The first concerns the level of difficulty of the language presented. The Foreign Service Institute classifies the difficulty of Korean as belonging to the highest of four groups of languages. It may thus take 1,320 class hours for an English native speaker to reach advanced proficiency in Korean (compared to 480 hours for group 1 languages such as French). Beginner level textbooks (including self-study guides) thus frequently make conscious decisions to simplify the language and to introduce grammar more gradually. As an example of this simplification, the competing text, Vincent and Yeon, Teach Yourself Korean (McGraw-Hill, 2003) delays specific discussion of grammatical particles by dropping them wherever possible from textbook dialogues in the opening chapters (according to patterns that are quite appropriate in spoken Korean). Colloquial Korean, on the other hand, opts for faithful inclusion and explicit discussion of particles from the start, including, for example, the use of the subject particle in negative copula expressions (p. 38), which is most often superfluous in spoken Korean. Although accurate and thorough, the grammar presented in Colloquial Korean may be unnecessarily burdensome for self-study beginners with no background in linguistics.

The second drawback of this book is its failure to present the language in a vibrant, “fun” context that may work to motivate learners to pursue further their interest in Korean language and culture. Dialogues are typically generic rather than specific to the Korean context and devoid of anything but the most superficial or stereotypical references to Korean culture. The chapter on “dining out”, for example, contains little of the language use that distinguishes eating (and drinking) out in Korea (such as the various ways one can hail the waiter/waitress, toasts, debating who pays the bill, etc.) and only the most generic Korean food (kalbi and kimchi) are mentioned. This stands in poor contrast to the competing Teach Yourself Korean, which depicts characters drinking soju (a distilled Korean liquor) and ordering squid from the ajŏssi (lit. “uncle”, a term used to address a male waiter) before toasting each other with “kŏnbae” “cheers”. In addition, “cultural points” given in the text seem to be preoccupied with creating an impression of South Korea as a modern, westernized society, rather than attempting to explain traditional Korean customs or culture-specific patterns of language use. This includes the presentation of mundane facts, such as that Korean apartments typically have two or three bedrooms (p. 96), that Koreans work forty hours a week (p. 66) and that 80 per cent of people own a mobile phone (p. 190).

In conclusion, the book represents a solid pedagogical tool or reference guide either for the linguistically informed or for those with some previous knowledge of Korean. However, as a simple, entertaining entry point to Korean language, it is found to be lacking.