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

For many people, learning Korean is an uphill struggle. Like climbing an endless, endlessly steep slope with no end. You have to take things in your stride, be realistic about where you want to reach and where you are in realtion to your final goal.

The most important thing is ATTITUDE. Never ever go into class, a conversation or a newspaper article thinking "I can't do this" "this is too difficult". Unfortunately Koreans have this attitude to language learning and it easily rubs off on you. Brush it off! But you also have to be realistic - focus on what you know and then if you learn something new, be proud of yourself. That is learning! If you don't know something, forget it. What you know is more much more important.

Once you have the right ATTITUDE, you need the right TOOLS. These will change and develop, as you improve. When you are a beginner, what you need is a phrasebook, a dictionary and a kids book.

Use the kids book to practise the alphabet and keep you entertained with pretty pictures. It will naturally teach you some words while you practise, although these may well be animals. Just remember, in the long run, everything, and I mean everything helps.
Use the phrasebook to learn practical words, expressions and phrases without getting confused by boring and irrelevant grammatical explanations. This will help you start talking immediately. Don't worry if you don't undersand anyone though. Focus on understanding individual words that you already know.
Use the dictionary whenever you can. An electronic one will help. If you see a sign, look up the words. If you hear a word often, try and guess how to spell it, and look it up. Use it to check words you have forgotten, BUT never, ever, ever look up a word in English and translate it into Korean. This is a terrible, terrible idea because no one will understand you and you will be confused and lose confidence. Trust me.

The kids book is for kindergarten children and literally teaches you how to write. Simple and great. The "teach yourself Korean" is a great book with dialogues and phrases and even simple grammatical explanations. It's only disadvantage and this is a big one, is that everything is transliterated into English letters. Ie, no Korean characters. And finally I still use the phone as a dictionary today. The dictionary is extremely in depth.