Tuttle's Korean Stories for Language Learners Review

By far one of the most popular and recommended books for Korean learners, but does it live up to the hype? Hopefully with this review you can make a more informed decision as to whether this book is for you. The book has 222 pages, 42 stories of varying length and at the time of writing costs $14.53 via Amazon.

The book was initially published in 2018 and has gained huge traction in Korean learning circles due to the appeal of "folktales" and learning through stories being seen as the premier way to learn a language. On top of that it comes with an audio CD or alternatively a free audio download from their website if you purchase the digital version.

For Korean Learners?

On inspection of the cover, we can see a typical Korean depiction of a tiger, which were often considered slow and stupid. Following the contents there is a preface explaining the background behind the authors and an introduction to the Korean languagesection. This quickly covers some simple history about the country and about the writing system Hangeul.

The first 2 stories are a simple conversations between 2 imaginary people as opposed to stories, the simplicity is great for jumping straight in, as the stories get progressively longer throughout the book. The title is followed by romanisation of the title, which I can't help but feel was done to meet some kind of layout demand or character count because it serves very little purpose.

Personally I find the passage being typed out in English a gross waste of space and frankly quite distracting as it's much more attractive to read, when you have been reading Latin script your entire life. I like the addition of the highlighted vocabulary and comprehension questions but I find the romanisation completely pointless if you could not read the passage which has zero romanisation.

The writing activity is very interesting and could serve useful for those who have a Korean friend or family member who could check it for them however I think the knowledge of the learner may be lacking to write anything meaningful, especially in the later sections.

As we continue we can see the size of the passages has increased a fair amount eventually ending up to being multiple pages. They do however remain in simple sentences and only sticks to using the -습니다 form except for quoted speech. I do think they could have benefit from using varied forms especially diary/plain form which is used for written text or the children's story form which can mix ㅂ니다 and 요 at times.

Having read through all the stories, I find the main draw to be the cultural side of the stories. Most Koreans will know the more popular folktales and sometimes they will be referenced in media, so having prior knowledge is an advantage. However I believe for beginners they contain a lot of words that will not appear very often at all such as 산신령. 

To add to the cultural side, almost all of the stories are accompanied by a cultural notes section that explains an aspect of Korean culture. As you can see in the example above, I believe they could have benefit from adding the Hangeul of the object they are talking about so that it will become more familiar. 

I think the illustrations are well drawn and really add to the flavour of the book, being very consistent and displaying a scene from the folktale. I think the culture notes combined with the English translation for every story probably means you will gain just as much if not more from this if you have a passing interest in Korea than the average learner would gain.

Following each passage is a 'pre-reading questions' section which I'm sure is a typo because most of them aren't displayed before the story or even visible on the same page. I like that these questions are written in Korean which gives you more words and expressions to learn along side the stories.

Earlier I mentioned that I don't understand why the vocabulary section contained romanisation when it is not present for anything else other than the title. Well even more strange and baffling to me is that the final story (pictured above) has very simple words. Words like 귀, 이만큼 and 평생  show up multiple times before this so I'm not sure why other than to fill space.

Once again more odd decisions greet us after the main content by where we are greeted by the sound of hangeul and some writing practice sections. For some reason I feel these would have been of greater benefit before starting. There is no real instruction on how to read hangeul prior to this and unless you some how caught it in the contents list then you would already know and have read a fair few pages of Korean before this point.

The audio seems to fit the strange decisions made by the rest of the team. It is slowly read, over pronounced and seemingly filmed in someone's room. For me this is a negative because I don't see the point in making it so artificial, when you could just read it normally and help learners transition into native content easier. It very much seems like an afterthought or done in a way that would save the most money.  I hope the lady got paid well for her efforts but I think if you want to make and professionally print a book it's not up to that standard.

Final Thoughts

I see this book receive a lot of praise but I don't see why. When the book first launched there was a huge gap in the market for reading content and there still is, although I believe the information is more readily available on where to find simple reading content now. 

Once we have graduated from one of the graded readers available we can simply move on to simpler content such as webnovels or into any field you are interested in. While the vocabulary contained in this book is very decent, you will run into many, many more words in content made for natives.

Purchase the book on Amazon here.

For a similar price I can only recommend Olly Richards' Short Stories. For me it has much more content and is almost completely full of Korean text with very little English and zero romanisation. You can read my review below. If your funds allow, why not try both.

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