Learning Korean Hanja 특허 받은 분해조립식 한자 학습법 Paperback – October 6, 2014

Do not be scared off by the fact it is a Korean-only book! It is super easy to understand if you have even just the very basics of the language, since it teaches everything based on the simplest of elements of nature, like head, wood, pig, et cetera. I absolutely don't blame the authors for not publishing this book in an English translation, because it simply isn't needed. My level of Korean, and I did get it tested formally, is not even yet low-intermediate, and I am therefore still a "beginner" at the language, but I find this book absolutely no problem in the world to understand and to learn from. Please do NOT be scared off because it is in Korean only! No way!What does this book do for you? It teaches you the complete Korean language - all through its root words, which come from, or are used to describe (in Native Korean) the key 1800 Chinese characters that entered the language well over 2000 years ago. The Koreans were (and still are) a neighbouring tribe to the Han Chinese, and both benefitted from each other's advancements in culture, technology and in the case of Koreans, language too. Every character has its Chinese derived (although transformed into the Korean way of pronouncing it) pronunciation - called "UM" - but also its native, aboriginal Korean explanation - called "HUN". Thus for every character, you learn the more everyday, less polished, native Korean word, but also the more urbane, educated, polished, civilized, Chinese derived word. These characters were all Koreans needed for well over 2000 years to communicate with each other in writing and in speech and so we can see that they contain the practical totality of the language. Even though nowadays, for convenience, the characters are less often written, their sounds and spellings are still used all the time, in virtually every Korean sentence, read, written, or spoken! There is no way forward without learning ALL OF THEM. So, the next big trick - how to learn ALL OF THEM!How to learn all of them? Well... this way; the way the book explains for us to do it. The book proves in blindingly obvious ways that the characters are anything but arbitrary. Each and every character tells a very precise meaning that derives from the exact radical (root) characters used inside it. Thus, for the different characters pronounced "GYO" and depicting two people sitting on the grass talking to each other, while there is the basic character with just these people sitting there, when you add things onto them you get different shades of meaning for this same sound "GYO". Thus, if you add in a tree it becomes a school, since back in neolithic, prehistoric, aboriginal times when the ancestors of the Chinese and Koreans were living in huts and hunting and fishing for survival, you taught the stories of your tribe to your children under the shade of a tree. If you add in a cart instead, it becomes "to compare" as the character now depicts two people sitting on the grass talking next to a cart - evidently comparing the items in the cart with the intent to trade or bargain. If you add in a town radical (which looks like a flag) it depicts the two people sitting outside a town, so the meaning becomes "outside". If you add in the character for string, and this is kind of gross and morbid, the one person is strangling the other with it, so it means to strangle or to tie up. Next time you encounter "GYO" as part of a Korean word, you can think through this list of images and decide which one it is most likely to be in context. Thus "HAK-GYO" must mean study-school and not study-strangle or study-compare or study-outside if it's in a scholarly context. In the context of world affairs, when you see "WEI-GYO" it most likely means foreign-relations and not foreign-strangling or foreign-school, nor foreign-comparisons.The book has hundreds of pages demonstrating the building of different related characters based on the same root character. It is just spectacular fun, teaches the language terrifically quickly, and also provides a fascinating insight into the lives of our prehistoric ancestors or cousins over in East Asia. It is certainly more fun than any kind of game, and it's more useful than almost anything else if you have anything at all to do with Korea or with Koreans.Anyhow, I hope I've made the case for you to buy this book, and I sincerely hope Amazon keeps selling it. While there is no royal road to second language mastery, this is the closest that you can get to such a road for Korean.I still do hope that they produce an English language version of this book though. Even though like I said if you even have quite elementary Korean you can use it with no real problem, I think they could design a "Learn Korean through Chinese Characters" book that would be the first book to really present the language according to how the language really developed and evolved - through a symbiotic relationship between native Korean and basic Chinese. I noticed that a Japanese Kanji book is being released by the authors, so why not a "Learn Korean through Chinese Characters" book. The authors are Koreans, after all! Evidently it would be a new version of the book, not simply a translation of the book profiled on this page, as its goals would be to teach both the native Korean words and the sino-Korean roots together, to anglophones. Seeing the popularity of for instance Grant's Hanja book and a few others in English like it, there would definitely be a market for this much more user friendly method of learning Korean. There are millions of non-Koreans living in Korea who would like the book, let alone many oversease like myself who are big fans of the culture and the language.