Easy Korean Reading For Beginners

I cannot recommend this book + the free mp3s from the TTMIK website highly enough! For beginners, it's really fantastic and probably the sole reason that I am no longer struggling with several very basic but very tricky aspects of the Korean language; how a basic sentence is structured (very different word order to any other language I know): pronunciation/sound change rules (this was not clear to me even after learning Hanguel without using this book to actually see/hear it working in practice): several very common expressions that I now hear everywhere and have become second nature to me (요즘에는 is just one example of this - after hearing it multiple times here, I don't have to even think about it anymore, when at first I kept mishearing it). You just don't get this kind of reading and listening practice from pure textbooks, but any other source is way too difficult when you're just starting out.

Each story has an audio track, where the story is read by 2 different voices, then repeated again slowly with 1 voice repeating the hard to pronounce words (clearly marked in the book), and then finally the vocabulary list is read out by voice 3. The audio tracks are available for free online, but I think the book is well worth buying for the transcripts and the really good focus on correct pronunciation. It's so well thought out and organised!

On top of that, the topics in these 30 “stories” (really short texts, really) are really charming and fun, not boring at all, which I think it amazing when you think how they needed to keep the language simple. Can't really complain about anything here, and I'm very excited to keep using TTMIK's books and materials for quality practice.