Читать книгу Practical Korean - Samuel E. Martin - Страница 7

Introduction

THIS BOOK has been written to fill a specific need: that of the hundreds of thousands of people now visiting Korea for business or holidays, or even living there for a year or two, who wish to learn something of the language spoken around them. The structure of Korean is peculiarly complex, and difficulties plague the foreign student from the very beginning. I have attempted to simplify some of the common problems and to acquaint the reader with the most useful way to say a lot of everyday things, without having to memorize long lists of grammatical rules.

The sentences are almost all given in the Polite (yo) style, which is both the simplest and the most widely useful. From this style, another common style—the Intimate style—is easily derived simply by dropping the final particle. Koreans who look at the book will miss the Formal (-seumnida) style which they feel more appropriate to use with foreigners on first acquaintance. My purpose in sticking to one style is to provide the reader with the means to say a great many different things, rather than teach him or her a great many ways to say the same thing. From an academic point of view, this approach has certain drawbacks. From a practical point of view, however, it is the quickest and simplest way to put the foreigner into direct communication with Koreans, and that is the aim of this book.

The material is presented using the romanization method that is officially authorized by the Korean government. The equivalents in other romanization systems are given in the table at the very end of this book.

The reader who plans to go on with his or her study of Korean beyond the material contained in this book will probably find it advisable to do so in the native script (Hangeul). For a scientific description of the structure of Korean, the reader is referred to the author’s other publications, Korean Phonemics and Korean Morphophonemics.

I hope that the material contained in this book—while perhaps oversimplifying a complicated language—will be of some immediate, practical use to the reader who wants to learn some Korean. And I hope some of those who learn Korean in a hurry will find such an interest in the language and the people who speak it that they will someday spare the time and patience needed to master the language more in depth.

SAMUEL E. MARTIN

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