Learning Korean... How to study korean, how to improve your Korean 4

I wrote about the little yellow book 한국문화 77hanguk munhwa 77 and how it gets much easier the more you read it. I was getting towards the end and I decided I wanted to try and expose myself to some "real" Korean. This means not Korean written for foreigners, but Korean written for Koreans.

I had a few spare minutes in a train station, so I checked out the kids section in the bookshop. I was looking for something with lots of pictures but also a good amount of text. And as luck would have it, I found a book of folktales aimed at first year elementary kids. It had everything I wanted. I could understand all the grammar, I just needed to check up on some of the vocabulary and I could read it before bed!

When I finished 한국문화 77hanguk munhwa 77 I wanted something a little more "relevant" to modern life, and a little more mature than a fairytale book. Luckily my friend had recently bought this little gemhe got it at emart:

At the beginning this book was hard, especially in terms of vocabulary... but as with the everything, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. This book is the best for learning Korean I have encountered because:

• it has short texts (about 200 words in length)
• The contents are really interesting: little facts and myths about science, history, modern life, culture
• Everything is arranged by chapters: science, history, medicine etc. so if you read one little passage after the other, the same vocabulary is repeated, and they become progressively easier to understand and require less dictionary work
• it's aimed at young adults (ie me) so the language is not archaic, childish or wildly complicated and technical
• It's written for Koreans so the Korean is natural and unedited.
• It's small so you can take it wherever you go - notice the wear and tear. I spend a lot of time in the subway so I read it there, adding up to about 60-80 minuted of reading 3 times a week!

Since this book is aimed at Koreans, it can be a little challenging at points, I started reading it also about 6 or 7 months in, but now after 9 months I can read about 3 passages in less than 40 minutes! I would recommend that if you really can't understand the first text (using a dictionary of course) to put it down, and try again a little later.