Korean Reader for Chinese Characters

This is a book on learning Hanja - the Chinese characters used extensively in South Korea (ROK) - for those who already know intermediate-level Korean. You will gain most from this book if you have done intermediate material such as Modern Korean: An Intermediate Reader, Selected Readings in Korean (KLEAR Textbooks in Korean Language), or the KLEAR books on the intermediate level: Integrated Korean: Intermediate 1: Text: Intermediate Level etc. This book does not cover any new grammar beyond the intermediate level - it only teaches you Hanja. The vocabulary is not new either, depending on your background study. I used this book for two purposes: to learn the most important Hanja, and to improve my reading skills. Because this book pretty much revises the things you learned in the basic and intermediate stages, using this book gives you a good opportunity to perfect your basic reading skills. The book also gave me a really nice break before I went into more intense textbook studies again and allowed me to re-cap what I knew and still learn something new at the same time. Each chapter starts with a text to read and is in mixed script, i.e. Hangul and Hanja. This is followed by vocabulary lists but only of the Hanja, not of the Hangul ! Next is a large number of exercises of various sorts for learning the Hanja: reading, writing etc. These were very effective and not that difficult. There is no romanization at all, by the way. The text-topics are very varied, everything from politics and history to sports. The appendix of the book shows you how to draw Chinese characters, and also has English translations of the texts. There are 40 chapters in this book, and in the book they say it should take you 1-2 years to complete it depending on whether you use it by itself or together with another textbook. I used the book by itself and it took me on average one week to complete a chapter, so you could complete it in about 40 weeks. Keep in mind that you are not really learning any new grammar or vocabulary, and so you concentrate your time on the Hanja alone. I really liked this textbook: the print is large, the explanations are clear and non-technical, the exercises effective, and there are usually drawings and photos in each chapter - which is always very nice and helps you connect the language you are learning with People!.

Korean Reader for Chinese Characters (Klear Textbooks in Korean Language) I feel this is an excellent book for studying Hanja. Not only does it include the radicals and show stroke order for each character, but chapters begin with reading selections that incorporate the Hanja vocabulary that is learned. Starting off with basics, and proceeding to more difficult characters and increasingly higher level text selections. Activities are included for memorizing meanings of each character, however you must provide your own space for repetitive practices of writing each character.