Lingo Mastery's Korean Short Stories for Beginners Review

Lingo Mastery have been making language learning content for a while now and finally have got round to stories for Korean learners. Hopefully this means that they will continue to make content and we can look forward to more Korean content from them. As you may know from my previous posts, I consider reading to be the best way to learn a language, so I am always interested in new reading and story content for Korean.

Previously I have reviewed Olly Richards' Short Stories in Korean for Intermediate Learners and Billy Go's Korean Reading Made Simple. All of these books seem to offer different things for the learner and While reading through this book, I found out something about reading that I had not really considered the specifics of. If you would like to check out Lingo Mastery's full selection click here.

The content

Much like Olly's book and their own 2000 words book we are first greeting by Lingo Mastery's philosophy on language learning and using reading to learn a language. I like to recommend reading these tips because I feel a lot of people do not really understand what to do and they outline the generally principles very well. The aim is to finish the content and understand that you won't quite get everything. This will make it much easier for you to read on your own later.

Then we have the title of the story with the full Korean text, which is relatively well spaced so that it doesn't just look like a huge wall of text that is hard to read. Following we are given paragraphs of Korean with an English translation. Then much like Olly's book a summary and comprehension questions.

For me the general content is pretty satisfactory although, I will always feel like any space wasted on a translation is just padding. The biggest issue with the book for me is the amount of space taken up by text with translation, when all that space could have been used for more stories or making the stories longer.

Excerpt of story 4

It's very hard for me to recommend this book to beginners as the content is definitely intermediate at least, perhaps sometimes even advanced on some occasions. Many words are either very rare or highly specific. The level of the book is too high for beginner's to jump into yet if you are at the level of being able to read it comfortable you would be better off reading native content as you will come across the same kinds of specific words.

The vocabulary sections and highlighted words in these books often confuse me. I don't really understand the inclusion non-beginner words and grammar but still highlighting very easy words that one would find in the early stages of learning. On top of that often there are words highlighted multiple times in following texts, almost as if they don't want you to read them in order or are trying to give you the option of starting wherever you want.

I think the summary could have been improved if it didn't have the translation directly underneath as our brain's are lazy and will always choose the path of least effort which most likely will be the English text. As I have said before, I think comprehension questions are a great addition to any reading book, they give you more to read and also help you to see if you are understanding the content.

Summary and vocabulary

My thoughts

So I my huge revelation while reading these texts because that's what most of them are, simply texts. I'm not entirely sure why they used the title "stories" while half of them are simply texts more akin to school text books. 

One of the biggest downsides to having a book set up like this as opposed to telling a story is that it kills the joy of reading. Reading texts should be fun and engaging, you should want to know what is going to happen next and be interested in the characters motivations and how they interact with the world around them.

Another side to reading an actual short story is that you lose the repetition of words. Repetition is how we learn language. We see a word for the first time, find out it's meaning and then we can gradually mould it's meaning through it's use in many different context. With these short texts it's very hard to get that flow of seeing even fictional words like Dothraki, which shows up many times even within the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire, that you literally cannot forget it.

Korean and English translation

Feedback to Lingo Mastery

The book could have been great but it misses out on all the best bits that Olly Richards book hits so well. If the stories had just been a lot longer and more like actual stories as some of them are it could have been much better. I think the added picture in Olly's stories gave a much better idea of what the text was going to be about.

I would do away with the English translation, the point of reading is to gain knowledge of the target language and be able to understand the target language, the addition of the translations serves the user nothing to improve their Korean ability and at best it's just there to check that you are understanding which is what the comprehension questions do a great job of on their own.

The level of the content is far too high for beginner's I would put a lot more effort into asking non-native learners of Korean to vet the product before choosing which words to highlight and which words will be too specific for learners. 

Comprehension questions and answers

The main bulk of the stories can be compared with native texts, of which it is most beneficial to read stuff that you want to read, so when being offered text on the same level as native content but have no interest it is very difficult to see the advantage of having the book. 

I was excited for the project and I would to see more with this feedback taken into account. I like companies that are producing content for language learners but I believe some of the content is a bit misguided and I would like to see everything improve for the benefit of the learner, which in turn will benefit the companies as they will know what to produce.

At the end of the day the price is relatively low at only $3.99 for the PDF version. However I would recommend it more for people who consider themselves intermediate learners. If you would like to purchase a copy of this book please follow this link to Amazon.

For Beginners I highly recommend checking out Olly Richards' Short Stories in Korean for Intermediate Learners, it's a great amount of content for the price, you can read the review using the link below.

Excerpt from Olly Richards' Bonus Story

For related posts please check out these pages:

• How to Start Reading in a Foreign Language
• Nintendo Switch Games to play in Korean
• How to Use Ridibooks(Korean Ebook Store)
• Olly Richards' Short Stories in Korean for Intermediate Learners Review
• Billy Go's Korean Reading Made Simple Review
• I read 61 Korean books in 2020
  
• 7 Reading Tips to Accelerate Your Korean Learning
• 7 Fantasy Webtoons You Should Read in 2021
  
• Tuttle's Korean Stories for Language Learners Review