You Speak Korean! Paradigm Busters

[Rniks]

I was looking to buy a few books for learning Korean and remembered a series I had wanted to check out from a publishing company called Paradigm Busters. They were a series of text books and accompanying workbooks by Soohee Kim, Emily Curtis, and Haewon Cho called You Speak Korean! I believe there were 4 levels, 8 books in total. The site no longer seems to exist, which is a shame as all the audio material was on it at one point. And now, the books are fairly expensive on Amazon.

Would anyone know where to get them or the audio for a reasonable price? Or what happened to Paradigm Busters? Such a bummer if the materials are no longer readily available.

[Whodathunkitz]

I was looking to buy a few books for learning Korean and remembered a series I had wanted to check out from a publishing company called Paradigm Busters. They were a series of text books and accompanying workbooks by Soohee Kim, Emily Curtis, and Haewon Cho called You Speak Korean! I believe there were 4 levels, 8 books in total. The site no longer seems to exist, which is a shame as all the audio material was on it at one point. And now, the books are fairly expensive on Amazon.

Would anyone know where to get them or the audio for a reasonable price? Or what happened to Paradigm Busters? Such a bummer if the materials are no longer readily available.

Still editor in chief according to LinkedIn.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-curti ... -a2384032/

I just did a web search. No further info.

[Rniks]

I was looking to buy a few books for learning Korean and remembered a series I had wanted to check out from a publishing company called Paradigm Busters. They were a series of text books and accompanying workbooks by Soohee Kim, Emily Curtis, and Haewon Cho called You Speak Korean! I believe there were 4 levels, 8 books in total. The site no longer seems to exist, which is a shame as all the audio material was on it at one point. And now, the books are fairly expensive on Amazon.

Would anyone know where to get them or the audio for a reasonable price? Or what happened to Paradigm Busters? Such a bummer if the materials are no longer readily available.

Still editor in chief according to LinkedIn.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-curti ... -a2384032/

I just did a web search. No further info.

Ah, well glad to see that at least, thanks! Maybe it's temporary or possible to get in touch directly.

[Whodathunkitz]

Whois website info for http://paradigmbusters.com. Not looking good.

Try Wayback machine or direct contact

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://pa ... usters.com

[Rniks]

Whois website info for http://paradigmbusters.com. Not looking good.

Try Wayback machine or direct contact

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://pa ... usters.com

Thank you so very much for providing this information! Using it I was able to get the complete audio for volumes 3 and 4. It seems like if you want the audio for volumes 1 and 2, you need a login with the University of Washington. I will attempt to reach out directly and see if I get a response regarding both the texts and remaining audio. I'll update if I do, in case anyone else might be interested.

[Whodathunkitz]

Whois website info for http://paradigmbusters.com. Not looking good.

Try Wayback machine or direct contact

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://pa ... usters.com

Thank you so very much for providing this information! Using it I was able to get the complete audio for volumes 3 and 4. It seems like if you want the audio for volumes 1 and 2, you need a login with the University of Washington. I will attempt to reach out directly and see if I get a response regarding both the texts and remaining audio. I'll update if I do, in case anyone else might be interested.

Glad to help. Good luck.

[Rniks]

Quick update. The University of Washington wasn't able to help, but the publishing company's direct email replied and said that they are currently working on the website. (I did not get a timeline on this.) They also offered to mail me a copy of their old CDs in the meantime, but ended up emailing me the sound files a couple of days later, instead! Yay!

There's a bunch of files and they need to be sorted, as I'm not sure how they are organized, but they do play. And I'm willing to bet it wouldn't be terribly difficult with the books to figure it all out.

[Bylan]

Looks like I'm about a year late to this post, but I was doing some lurking for good Arabic study methods from scratch for my good Australian friend who's about to move to Saudi Arabia to teach English, and I came across this post.

I was a student of Soohee Kim for almost my entire undergrad at the University of Washington. She is not only the best Korean teacher I've had, hands down (in the US and in language programs in Seoul), but she's one of the best language teachers I've ever encountered on my journey to Korean, Portuguese and French. I won't go into her classroom methods or her biography, but I will say this - her excellence as a teacher is reflected in her You Speak Korean! books. My aforementioned good friend from Australia was someone I met in Seoul as we were both working and improving our Korean, and I introduced him to her book series. We ended up referring to her books as the "bible" for Korean grammar, and her as the "Oracle" of Korean (although I know that she would want credit shared with her coauthors Emily Curtis and Haewon Cho). The depth and precision in her grammatical explanations of Korean are without equal in any other Korean resource I've encountered, and I've dabbled in just about all of them. She doesn't just tell you "use X grammar to say Y", she explains the thought process that leads a Korean to choose that sentence structure, and even provides a historical background for the evolution of how the grammar came to be used in modern speech. It's one of those unicorns of language resources that you wish could exist for every language you want to learn, but could only ever produced for that language based on the people who made it.

Furthermore, the example sentences and translations are colloquial, interesting, and illustrative of day to day spoken language, in Korea and the US, respectively. I cannot recommend this book series highly enough, and can guarantee that if you get up to the Green and Blue books (the intermediate books, each book is based on a Taekwondo belt color), you will be rewarded with a colorful, highly detailed topographic map of the Korean language that will be your guide for years as you improve and refine your Korean.

To summarize, it's a good book series.