Lonely Planet Korean Phrasebook

My teenager uses this book to communicate with her international friends at school, over emails, and text messages. It works! Information is accurate and they are better able to communicate.

I've been living in Korea for about 6 months now and use this book frequently. It's small enough to carry around in a purse or pocket but holds TONS of information. Everything you need on a daily basis to get around with the locals. The layout is great, you can see it, sound it out or if all else fails... just point! Would definately recommend!

While this title is not mainly a Korean /language/ title, or a book one expects to learn in depth language nicities, nonetheless, the book does an amazing job of condensing these minutiae very quickly, accurately, and somewhat completely (at a begginer level of course), in very clear language, without any weird linguist smarty pants fancy grammar jargon. This is the intro. The rest of the book follows the content and layout of similar titles, and is fairly useful for the beginner.

Living in Korea, I've seen and used several phrasebooks. In most respects, one is as good as another. But this one has the best elementary explanation of Korean grammar I've ever seen in a phrasebook; if you plan to be in Korea long enough to learn a little Korean, this will be the most helpful phrasebook that I know of.The problem is that they created their own system of romanization and a few phrases in the book are presented in it but not in Korean. That is really annoying; the phrases are completely worthless unless you want to study LP's unique romanization.

This 3rd edition is much, much better than the 2nd edition. Thank God, this edition keeps the old Romanization system. The grammar explanations are simple but meaningful. A good little book to carry around if you haven't had a chance to take language courses yet. There's some culture in it, but you'll need to carry around a Lonely Planet guide for the whole country.