Tuttle Learner's Korean-English Dictionary: The Essential Student Reference

I've been studying Korean for three months, several hours a day. I noticed this book because I'd studied Chinese using Tuttle(books) and found the approach effective, clever, with a sense of humor. I understand the gripes some people have made about the romanization, but the first thing you learn is to make your own "romanized" sound approximations and take the Google romanizations with a grain of salt, or just dump them. They're often way off. As you speak the language, you'll get a sense of sounds that can't be romanized. Watch some Korean TV content/movies to practice, if you want. And of course, you'll hear different pronunciations of the same word, dialects (or North Korean sounds - the lead young woman in Squid Game) that you won't find with romanizations. Still romanizations are a blunt translation instrument that can get you started. I spent my first month on the alphabet alone, on specific sounds, repeating over and over. I began to realize, okay, this is going to take me a while. But at least I know the alphabet now and can generally read words well enough that I can dictate them back into Google translate if I don't have the korean, and more often than not, I get the word I want. So I mention all this as encouragement- there were a number of frustrated comments citing problems with the romanization. Aside from that, there is a English-Korean key link in the book for those who want to look for english words in this dictionary. In addition, someone said the word yaegi (book) appears on p. 302 as" a word with another meaning". Maybe I didn't see what that reviewer saw. "yaegi" is the shortened form of "iyagi." (see: 얘기, 이야기) Both mean "story." in Papago and Google translate. Maybe this book isn't for everyone. I find it just right, with a good selection for a beginner-intermediate learning fast. Sure, I have about 20 other Korean workbooks I find useful. This one will be one of my favorites, for sure. And PS, I have no connection to this book, the author, Tuttle, or Amazon, no financial gain from praising this book, etc- I just appreciate it when someone comes up with a smart approach.

This dictionary is what I was looking for my Korean language studies, I just received it yesterday and as a more than ten languages student that I am my impression was great: this dictionary gives you the hanja (chinese characters used in Korean) well at least the essential you will not find in any other books. Since the Chinese language has influenced Korean vocabulary so much is better to understand the words with the characters, Korean is like Japanese, a mixed script but in Korean hangeul is enough to communicate so is not NECESSARY to read and write hanja but it is makes you a better Korean language student if you learn them, to do so I recommend "A Guide To Korean Characters Reading And Writing Hangul And Hanja" by Bruce K. Grant which teaches you 1,800 chinese characters and how to write the hangeul letters.

Not sure about student friendly. Students may not know the Korean word they want to look up. This does not have English to Korean… ONLY Korean to English. I do not like that they used the English alphabet and the Korean words are in the romanized order. I added my own tabs with the Korean alphabet. I do like how the Korean word is a different color than the definition, making it easier to spot the words. I do like the examples , so you can see how it is used. The highlighted notes are great too. It would have been nice to see maybe an English index in the back… for example: see= 보다 then you can look up 보다 and see how to use it. As a student you need that English to Korean to help you find the words that you can’t remember to translate. Hope this helps

I want to learn some korean. Korean isnt as easy as say learning spanish ir Germany. But this dictionary help with the process.

It doesn't contain every single word, but It has so many that you can find in your workbooks, textbooks, crosswords, and so forth. If you need a dictionary to go along with your studies, this is the one for you! It works for most needs.

fantastic, really helpful, I love that it gives you the word you are looking for and uses it within a sentence. I have two dictionary's a pocket one and this one I prefer this one for comprehension and volume of words and use the pocket one as a carry around one. I also love that words are very easy to find in Kyubyong Park's dictionary. The layout is easy and the fonts large enough the way it is laid out also trains you in the art of looking up words using Korean letters and not relying so heavily on Romanization. I would definitely recommend this book to any beginner learn of Hangeul.

Numerous example sentences show how the basic words are used in context.

Korean dictionary, ease of use and needed.

Excellent Korean dictionary. Lots of examples usage. It even has etymologies for most words, and if of Chinese origin, contains the Chinese characters from which the word is derived. Highly recommended for Korean language learners.

A very useful dictionary for learning Korean. I purchased the Kindle version so I can carry the dictionary on my iPad along with my various learning Korean books. I chose this dictionary after browsing the selection of paper dictionaries at a specialty language bookshop here in Sydney.