Billy Go's Korean Made Simple 1 Grammar Book Review

Just in case you don't know by now. Billy Go is an American, Korean teacher who makes videos explaining grammar and sometimes various aspects of the Korean language through slightly comedic videos. For the past year he has regularly been streaming on Sunday's on various topics voted for by subscribers.

According to his website, he began learning in 2005 and has lived in Korea for multiple years and now visits there for a few months every year. He started his YouTube channel in 2012 and released Korean Made Simple 1 in 2014. It was then followed up with Korean Made Simple 2 in the same year and Korean Made Simple 3 a few years later in 2016.

He recently started a Beginner video course that is completely free on YouTube that is set to span 100 videos. Although personally I would recommend the books due to it being quicker to go through overall or possibly playing the videos at 2x speed.

I personally used all 3 Korean Made Simple books when I was starting out, so I will also share a few tips on how to use the books throughout the review. Hopefully this review can help you make an informed decision on whether or not you wish to purchase the books.

Korean Made Simple grammar book front cover

Lingo Mastery's 2000 Most Common Korean Words in Context Review

My number one factor of a good vocabulary resource is that it gives you an example sentence for each word. Simple sentences are simply the best way to acquire new words and grammar. Simple sentences are great because it gives you a much higher chance of comprehending a word, even without context.

By now you may have heard of Lingo Mastery. They have released a few books in various languages such as, German, Japanese, Russian, Italian, Spanish and have many different types of resources including, conversations, stories and vocabulary books. You can pick them up in physical or ebook form, the former of which is quicker and cheaper.

Here I will be reviewing the 2000 Most Common Korean Words in Context e-book. I was surprised to see that they had spread out to Asian languages after discovering their Italian content. If you would like to see all the content they have to offer click here.

How to Use Ridibooks(Korean Ebook Store)

Depending on where you live, it can be very difficult to get your hands on Korean books. Here in the UK I imagine there are only very specific areas in London that have a Korean populace selling their old books. This leaves us with the options of flying to Korea to pick up books and maxing out our luggage weight or doing the simpler and (sometimes) cheaper option of buying E-books.

Smartphone Apps for Learning Korean

 

When you think of or ask about language learning apps, the first thing to come up will likely be Duolingo. Sadly it has a lot of drawbacks, it's slow to update despite having ads and subscription options, the courses are community made and pretty low quality and overall it doesn't contain enough content to actually get anywhere in the language you're studying.

How to Type in Korean and How to Practice Typing Faster

Check out the related video here: 

When learning a new language with a new writing system many people like to focus on how to write or type in the language. While writing is not strictly necessary unless you live in the country, typing will be very handy for when you need to look up a word, search for things or even have conversations. So how can we go from not having a clue where the keys are to touch typing. While this guide is aimed at Korean, the tips can be used for any language.

How to Spend as Much of Your Day as Possible Learning Korean

With the rise of immersion learning and 40 hour week challenges and such, I feel this might help those who want to push their time to it's limits. As someone who has been doing at a minimum 5 hours a day of Korean for the past 2 years, I started to value my time to the point where it will frustrate me if I feel someone is wasting my time.

I used to spend days not really achieving anything and wondering where the days have gone, I had zero plans for my days and just did things whenever I felt like it except for certain things like exercise that I would do at around the same time every day, which is pretty much what I applied to my language learning.