Making Out in Korean: From Everyday Conversation to the Language of Love--A Guide to Korean as it's really spoken! (Making Out (Tuttle))

Rating:
Summary: New Revised Edition!
Review: I remember reading some reviews on this on sites before and it didnt get many good ratings because of the romanization. I agree, romanization in this book (in ALL korean books) is absolutely horrible and you should steer clear of. However, the new revised edition has hangul in it as well...So, the book has a lot of good stuff in it which has now become accessable due to having hangul. Without hangul, the book is no good. With it, it becomes a nice book for someone wanting to learn what you will not learn in other text books, slang and concepts that are more inappropriate for most textbooks to have in them.

Rating:
Summary: New Revised Edition!
Review: I remember reading some reviews on this on sites before and it didnt get many good ratings because of the romanization. I agree, romanization in this book (in ALL korean books) is absolutely horrible and you should steer clear of. However, the new revised edition has hangul in it as well...So, the book has a lot of good stuff in it which has now become accessable due to having hangul. Without hangul, the book is no good. With it, it becomes a nice book for someone wanting to learn what you will not learn in other text books, slang and concepts that are more inappropriate for most textbooks to have in them.

Rating:
Summary: Good Idea, Poor Execution
Review: The romanization in this book is virtually incomprehensible. A better, more consistant romanization would great. Hangul for those who know it would be even better. As it is, some native speakers I showed this to had a hard time figuring out what some of the stuff is. The poor choice of Korean notation makes this book nearly useless for figuring out many words and hence only 1 star. More comprehensive notes on terms would be great too instead of mainly a massive vocab list that likely has many errors and misses many nuances.

Rating:
Summary: Good Idea, Poor Execution
Review: The romanization in this book is virtually incomprehensible. A better, more consistant romanization would great. Hangul for those who know it would be even better. As it is, some native speakers I showed this to had a hard time figuring out what some of the stuff is. The poor choice of Korean notation makes this book nearly useless for figuring out many words and hence only 1 star. More comprehensive notes on terms would be great too instead of mainly a massive vocab list that likely has many errors and misses many nuances.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for teaching!
Review: This has more of the more up-to-date slangs present in Korea! It also includes many of the words that have double meanings, just as we do in English. Many dictionaries don't carry the alternative meanings that is used now, so this book really helps both English and Korean speakers who can pronounce the words correctly. Finally! I was able to use it extensively to communicate with many of my students and on my trips to Korea, and my younger cousins were able to use it to communicate back with me and others. This is the beginning of a great slang library!

Rating:
Summary: Revised edition is better
Review: To address comments below, the revised 2004 edition includes more idioms with the same categories, but MOST importantly includes the phrases in Hangeul, which was a major shortcoming of the first edition. The romanization is different - 2000 official Revised Romanization of Korean is used along with a rough pronunciation. Even if you have the first edition, you should get a copy of the revised edition!