Book review: As much as a rat’s tail (Peter Liptak and Si Woo Lee)
No doubt you’ve seen this on bookshelves before – I vaguely recall taking a look at it quite some time ago, before I felt comfortable with trying to parse Korean sentences. I meant to come back to this book, and finally have the opportunity to enjoy it for real this time.
This is not for the absolute beginner – for that, I humbly recommend my own book, Korean Made Easy
Once you get started, it’s fairly clear that the slang is the focus here, displayed in big red letters. They’re organized according to Korean alphabetical order (가, 나, 다, 라, and so on) – another thing to assist the beginners and more natural feeling for more advanced students.
Each vocabulary word gets a dialogue, written in Korean and translated into English, although there’s little to help someone still struggling with grammar points and rules. There are, however, ample translations of a given Korean phrase, especially the meanings that are intended. While quite a few of these are inappropriate in polite company, they’re worth keeping your ear open as you’re out and about. Almost all the phrases have a literal meaning and the intended meaning, and it’s often interesting learning about the connection between the two.
A few difficulties mar the book. A couple of warnings for graphic or sexual language are either misplaced or missing altogether. It’s not something you’d want your kids to see you reading, unless you like answering awkward questions. Also, the dialogues tend to transliterate – not translate – the vocabulary word. I’m not sure if that’s more helpful to a serious learner, but it makes it a bit more difficult to read for this casual reader. While the book offers synonyms for most of the vocabulary words, less than half are translated.
Perhaps one way to use the book is as a quick one-a-day lesson – perhaps as a morning thing, or even a bathroom reader – that might help you learn something.
The occasional tongue-in-cheek references to Korean political figures are funny to laugh at if you’ve been around the country for awhile, but aren’t necessary to get a lot out of the book. The dialogues between other characters (Batman and Robin, for example) created more than a few chuckles along the way. The appendix and index are helpful in their own ways, the former being an excellent place to bone up on your dirty Korean and the latter being the Cliffs Notes with basic meanings.
Recommended, if you’re ready to go beyond basic or polite Korean.
Get it as a paperbook on Amazon
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Jo-Anna Lynch
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Peter
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