When it comes to writing in a language that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet, a lot of practice is required to completely understand and apply the language. Plenty of practice activities, drills, and writing guides would be necessary to develop one’s writing skills in Korean. The Hanyang Korean 1 Writing Practice book offers all of these features. It has loads of practice material that will help students develop their writing skills and reach new heights.
Overview
First and foremost, this book is completely written in Korean. So the ability to read and understand Korean is important to further continue with this book. Second, this book simply offers writing practice. There is no grammar, vocabulary or listening activities and the book focuses mostly on writing. The book has 15 units which focus on various topics like travel, money, activities, expressing possession/ownership and other basic level topics. There are various writing activities including fill-in-the-blank activities, comprehension questions, making questions, writing explanations and much more. There’s plenty of variety in each unit and lots of opportunities to put students’ writing skills to use. The book is accompanied by some nice drawings and images to give visual examples and add a little style, which is more preferable than just straight text. However, there are some units that simply consist of text and this might be a bit unappealing and overwhelming to some students.
In each lesson, students get to develop their language skills by focusing on various writing activities including fill-in-the-blanks, matching exercises, full sentence writing, verb charts, conjugation exercises, writing prompts and more. The activities change throughout each lesson, but each unit contains a nice mixture of activities that help develop the student’s writing skills. Although each lesson offers a lot of variety and the units have somewhat different structures, students are challenged by the activities –the overall purpose of Hanyang Korean 1 Writing Practice.
Pros
· A wide variety of writing activities to help students improve their writing and reading skills.
· Many topics are covered that relate to daily life in Korea.
Cons
· The book is completely written in Korean so absolute beginners won’t understand the content of the book.
· The book only offers reading and writing activities and there are no opportunities to work on speaking or listening exercises.
"When it comes to writing in a language that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet, a lot of practice is required to completely understand and apply the language."
Recommended For
· College students who are learning Korean and want to improve their writing skills.
· Students enrolled in courses who want extra practice outside of the classroom.
· Learners who prefer self-study and textbook style learning.
Overall, Hanyang Korean 1 Writing Practice is a good way to improve one’s reading and writing skills. The book covers many topics and the activities are kept easy throughout the book. The exercises in each lesson are not an overbearing challenge at all, and students should have a pleasant time practicing Korean on paper. Hanyang Korean 1 Writing Practice makes a fine resource for students who can understand what they read and now want to go to the next stage of writing.
