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Rating: 
Summary: Commercial Endeavor - don't waste your money
Review: If you are reading this you are probably aware that good Korean texts are hard to find. Of the Korean learning materials out there I have sampled including the Korean Through English series, College Korean, FSI Tape set & book, and books published by Korean unversities not available in the US, the Integrated Korean series is by far the best. The Integrated Korean series stays away from using the arcane linguistic terminology of College Korean, avoids the oversimplification of KTE, and presents much more natural Korean usage than the textbooks published by Korean universities(including SNU, Yonsei, and Korea U). The grammatical explanations are great, the vocabulary is useful, and the cultural notes are also interesting and pertinent. Audio files for the dialogues are also available online for free on the U of Hawaii publishing webpage.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book for intermediate Korean
Review: If you are reading this you are probably aware that good Korean texts are hard to find. Of the Korean learning materials out there I have sampled including the Korean Through English series, College Korean, FSI Tape set & book, and books published by Korean unversities not available in the US, the Integrated Korean series is by far the best. The Integrated Korean series stays away from using the arcane linguistic terminology of College Korean, avoids the oversimplification of KTE, and presents much more natural Korean usage than the textbooks published by Korean universities(including SNU, Yonsei, and Korea U). The grammatical explanations are great, the vocabulary is useful, and the cultural notes are also interesting and pertinent. Audio files for the dialogues are also available online for free on the U of Hawaii publishing webpage.
Rating:
Summary: Commercial Endeavor - don't waste your money
Review: This book is not very well organized and it comes WITHOUT any audio whatsoever. You can download the audio from the Hawaii website BUT - it's only in real audio format which you can only play on your computer with the real audio program. You can't burn the audio to a cd and then listen to it in your car, for example. Or...you can buy the cd for $195!! No integrated audio is the first deadly sin for a language book. Worse, the audio situation with this book is an UNETHICAL attempt to rip you off. The University of Hawaii should be ashamed.
Rating:
Summary: "Commercial Endeavor" is way off
Review: This is a TEXTBOOK published by the University of Hawaii press. This is not a "Learn Korean in 10 days" deal and it is not a Pimsleur package. Textbooks are meant to be used in a classroom. This type of book is probably best for American-born Koreans who have no trouble finding audio immersion but perhaps understand the semantics of the English language and never learned those of the Korean language.
I, for one, have sets and sets of Korean textbook series on the Korean language and the closest any of the others have come to the level of the KLEAR series is Yonsei's grey-cover books. However, the explanations and up-to-date usage and phrases is more prevalent in the KLEAR series.
If you are trying to learn Korean, in general, at home, I recommend you already have a good understanding of how Korean sounds in general and how to pronounce Korean words. Because no amount of audio tapes/CDs will help you unless you have at least one Korean person around you who speaks fluently.
People should really make an attempt to read the "notes" under each grammar point extensively and understand the differences between the relevant grammar point and the ones mentioned in the note. Because, if you already know a decent amount of Korean but are not quite fluent, you will realize how dead-on their notes are. The cultural sections are a great bonus because those sections in other series are just not current enough with this day and age. Oh, and one other thing, if you reach the end of the book, you should probably go through their Korean-English vocabulary list at the back one by one to make sure you know them all. You do not want to progress to higher levels of the language with a limited selection of words.
Their grammar index and their vocabulary cross-reference at the end are great. The KLEAR series at each level is split into two which is more conducive for learning within a semester-based system often found in colleges. Therefore, the only drawback I find with the KLEAR series is I have to buy twice as many textbooks as I normally do for other series (such as Yonsei).
After having spent many years of going through my local Korean bookstores, I only managed to run into this series of textbooks by visiting the UCLA textbook store. I was attempting to see if they had UCLA Extension courses in Korean but found the undergraduate textbooks instead.
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