Elementary Korean second edition

Preface to the First Edition

This textbook began naively as a simple remake of Martin and Lee!s Beginning Korean (1969). Because Beginning Korean is entirely in Yale romanization, we believed Maitin?s system would be better appre* dated if only the book were in Han’gül The idea was to scan it onto disk，convert the Korean bits to a Korean, font, and reissue the textbook. Ross King and. Hyoshin Kim began scanning Beginning Korean onto disk at Harvard in 1989, Hyoshin Kim also did much of the initial hard work of creating the Microsoft Word™ files on the Apple Macintosh™ and converting the Korean fonts. She has been an excellent informant and critic throughout the project.

When we started teaching from Beginning Korean at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in autumn 1990, we soon found that much needed updating, correcting, shortening, or throwing out. Much was also missing. We continued to write new dialogues, and rework and revise the grammar notes throughout the academic year 1991-92, during which time we taught first-year Korean not from Beginning Korean, but from the new Korea University textbooks. The Korea University books have given us many ideas, and we ai*e grateful to the authors. We are also grateful to other textbooks for various ideas here and there: the Myongdo textbooks, Namgui Chang and Yong-chol Kim's Functional Korean, the Republic of Korea (ROK.) Ministry of Cultured Korean I-III, and Adrian Buzo and Shin Gi-hyon's Learning Korean: New Directions / (Pilot Edition 5). Но-min Sohn's recent descriptive grammar, Korean (1994), has also been of assistance.

In the nine years that have passed since this project began, the textbook has changed radically. While still owing much of its grammatical apparatus to the original Beginning Korean, this book has become a different creature. This is wliy, at the urging of Samuel Martin, we have changed the title to Elementary Korean and listed just our names as coauthors.

We would like to thank those who have helped malce tiiis textbook possible. Several cohorts of SOAS students have helped us—Chris Murphy and Eunice Brooker, who suffered through the first, chaotic revision of Beginning Korean', }anet Poole and Denise Chai. who put in. long hours during the summer of 1992 editing, organizing, and retyping the text; Flora Graham, Simon Hayward, Youngsoon Mosafiri, Natalie Lemay-Palmer, Satona Suzuki, Lars Sundet, and Mark Vincent (the 1992-93 cohort); Tom Hunter-Watts, Sakura Kato, Stefan Knoob, Andrew Pratt, Andy Wong, Erin Chung, Charlotte H0rlyk, Stephen Matthews, and Perniile Siem (the 1993-94 cohort); Andrew W. Oglanby, Adam Ban-, Steven Conroy, Sung Khang, Sue Perkins Mouis, Alex Calvo, Meher McArthur, Aileen Baker, Ethan Bond, and Edith Hodder (the 1994-95 cohort); Akiko Maeda, Masamichi Yasuda, Daniel Choo, Fedor Tsoi, Yu Maeda, Reiko Yamazaki, Nakako Takei, and Izumi Nakamura (the 1995-96 cohort). Two British Foreign and Сотлюп-wealth Office (FCO) diplomats on the Korean Long Course at SOAS also used the second pilot version and gave us valuable feedback: Colin Crooks and Patrick Butler, Most recently, the University of British Columbia (UBC) Korean 102 (Elementary Korean) cohorts for the academic years 1995-98 have provided valuable feedback, especially Jeff Armstrong, Jenny Cho, Brian Choi, Chinfai Choi, Clai'a Choi, Dian Choi, Karen Choi, Mina Chung, Ted Kim, Hannah Joe5 Janette Kim, Claudia Kwan, Jowan Lee, Marina Lee, Miyoung Lee, Tammy Lee, Victor Lim, Liza Park, Delphine Tardy, David Thumm, Ryo Yanagitani, and Jenny Yim. All have provided valuable comments and criticism for which we are grateful.

In particular, the authors wish to single out SOAS students Mark Vincent and Youngsoon Mosafiri for special thanks. Mark clocked nearly 100 hours revising, formatting, editing, and proofing the second pilot version on the Macintosh in May and June of 1993. He continued to provide excellent suggestions on fonts, formatting, style, content, and presentation in the 1993-94 academic session. Youngsoon performed the tedious, but important task of retyping all of the Korean in the new TrueType™ fonts on the Macintosh in the summer of 1994.

We have also benefited from the comments and criticisms of some of our colleagues. Seungja Choi was foolhardy enough to teach from tlie second pilot version during the 1993-94 academic session at Yale. She and her students raised many helpful points. SOAS Korean lectors Youngjoo Lee, Jiyong Shin, and Jae-mog Song also provided valuable input. David Moon and Yoon-Suk Chung at the University of California-Berkeley both made many useful criticisms, and Bjarke Freilesvig at the University of Oslo, Norway, gave valuable feedback too. In addition, some of our colleagues at the Korea Foundation-sponsored conference on "'Collaborative Korean as a Foreign Language (KFJ^) Textbooks Developmenf5 in Seoul, December 1993, made some useful criticisms of tlie second version: Chöngsuk Kim of Korea University, Dong-jae I^ee of the University of Hawaii, and Young-mee Yu Cho of Stanford. More recently, the manuscript has benefited from excellent criticisms and suggestions by UBC Korean Language Instructor Insun Lee, who has taught from the book at UBC since 1996, and from UBC Korean 102 teaching assistants Jee~Weon Shin and Soowook Kim, who taught from the book during the 1996-1997 and 1997-98 academic sessions, respectively. UBC students Victor Song, Gabriel Gervey, and Paul Liu made valuable suggestions during the 1996-1997 academic year, and Sally Foster and Sunah Park Cho compiled the answer key to exercises.

The recordings for this book were made in December of 1996, shortly before Tuttle Publishing underwent a series of managerial and editorial staff changes that have significantly delayed the appearance of this book. The technical aspects of the recording sessions were expertly supervised by Clay Dixon of UBC’s Crane Production Unit in the Crane Resource Centre. Native speaker voices were cheerfully voi-unteered by Mr. Ilsung Lee, Mrs. Sunah Park Cho, Nam-Iin Hur, Yunshik Chang, Miseli Jeon, Suk-man Jang, Hyoshin Kim, and a sxipporting cast of Korean visiting scholars and their families too numerous to name individually. We are grateful to them all.

Financial support for this project, at SOAS came from the Korea Research Foundation through its generous annual grants to the SOAS Centre of Korean Studies. The authors also would like to thank the SOAS Research Committee for providing funds for research assistance on this project; and the Center for Korean vStudies, University of California-Berkeley, for providing Ross King with the opportunity to convert the manuscript into NisusWriter™ as well as finish the pre-publication revisions while on a Korea Foundation post-doctoral fellowship during the 1994-95 academic year. Financial support for preparation of the final camera-ready copy at UBC came from the UBC Faculty of Arts, UBC^s Centre for Korean Research, and the SOAS Centre of Korean Studies. The authors were also pleased to win an Honorable Mention in the 1995 Tuttle Language Prize. We have used the prize money to support work on the textbook.