Book Review: First Step in Korean 하국어 입문

This is my first extensive book review.  I was cleaning my room and I happy to find a couple Korean language books that I had  long forgotten about.  I will be going through them periodically and reviewing them

Title:  First Step in Korean 하국어 입문
Publisher:  Kyung Hee University

Like the title suggests book is designed for beginners.  Personally I would label this book as an intermediate beginners book.  The only reason I say this is because from my own personal experience I began learning Korean from an actual children's school book.  Not only does it cover language but it touches upon culture too.  Although this book is packed with useful information, I have to say that the lessons can become dry at certain points.  The authors did not go especially out of their way to make it a "fun" learning experience.  In my opinion this book is most effective as a supplement to learning.  I would not recommend using it as a core resource for learning Korean.  As a core resource I believe that a website with organized lessons and a variety of multimedia is best (http://www.talktomeinkorean.com/).  It should be noted that all books suffer from the absence one important thing... sound in order to help pronunciation.  This is what really makes websites a superior resource.  Aside from the drawbacks I do have to say that this book really shines when it comes to dialogue and explaining sentence structure.

Final Verdict:  I would not go out of my way to acquire this book.  The reason being is because it really offer anything different from any other beginner Korean language book.  Most of the information found in this book can be found for free on the internet.   If you are fact if you are determined to get a book (which i do recommend), I would recommend an actual text book.