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FIRESIDE PRESS · SEOUL

You did not forget the word. You never had it.

423 beginner Korean words, each one carried inside two sentences you can actually say. The whole 171-page book, free — sent to your inbox as a PDF. No card, no sample chapter.

Also: there's a paid app with audio for every word, if you want that too.

WHY THIS HAPPENS

A word alone on a page cannot teach you to say anything.

You can recite three hundred words. Someone asks you something in a shop and nothing comes out. That is not a memory problem — the words went in as facts instead of tools, and recognising a word is a different skill from producing one.

Underneath that, something quieter is happening. Months go by studying vocabulary and grammar without once training the mouth or the ear. At conversational speed, near-identical sounds are impossible to tell apart, because you have never had to.

At first it is one pause before speaking. Then it is a habit. Then it is years of resistance built up around the sound of your own voice — and by then the problem is no longer Korean. You have taught yourself not to speak.

So no word in this book is ever alone on the page. Every one arrives inside two sentences — not so you can recognise it, but so you have a way to say it.

THE BOOK

This is what lands in your inbox.

Not a teaser chapter. 171 pages, typeset properly, the same file whether you ever buy anything or not.

A page of word entries — definition, two sentences, phrases, usage note.
Three entries per page
The respectful word pairs table, thirteen pairs.
Speaking to someone senior — thirteen pairs
The Hangul alphabet pages, from the first stroke.
Hangul from the first stroke
The verb endings table, all thirty-five endings.
All 35 verb endings, one table
A unit opening page, showing the situation the unit covers.
Each unit opens on a situation
The book cover — Fireside Press, Seoul, first edition.
Fireside Press · Seoul · first edition

HOW IT WAS MADE

We threw the first version away.

  • The frequency list did not survive contact with reality.

    The first draft was 300 words ranked by how often they appear. Common words scatter across every topic, so no unit held together and a learner had nowhere to put anything. We rebuilt the list around eighteen situations instead, and it grew to 423.

  • Nobody postponed the politeness problem.

    Korean changes shape depending on who is listening, and getting it wrong does not make you incorrect — it makes you sound rude. Thirteen everyday words are given here with their respectful twin from the start, and every sentence was checked to make sure it addresses the right person.

  • Every sentence was written for this book.

    846 of them, none lifted from a dictionary — which is why they sound like something a person would say rather than something a corpus would contain.

  • The person who checked them had not written them.

    Three separate blind reviews: one tested whether the book could handle twelve everyday scenes, one read all 846 sentences and marked only the ones that felt wrong, one tested the respectful forms. Ninety findings came back; eighty-four were adopted.

  • The rest is checked by machine, every build.

    No word appears that the book has not taught. No sentence uses a verb ending outside the endings table. No two entries share an example. The build refuses to produce a PDF if any of that fails.

THE PATH

Eighteen units, and then you're done with the beginner stage.

Each unit here is a place you actually stand — not one of seventeen hundred lessons with no finish line.

  • 01Greetings & People
  • 02Family & Relationships
  • 03Body & Health
  • 04Food & Eating
  • 05Home & Living
  • 06Clothes & Appearance
  • 07Time & Dates
  • 08Place & Direction
  • 09Getting Around
  • 10Shopping & Money
  • 11School & Studying
  • 12Work & Jobs
  • 13Weather & Nature
  • 14Leisure & Hobbies
  • 15Feelings & Personality
  • 16Talking & Communication
  • 17Everyday Actions
  • 18Describing Things

ALSO IN THE FREE BOOK

The grammar comes with it.

  • 35 verb endings in one table — the ones that actually appear in the sentences
  • 19 particles, with the rule for which form follows a consonant and which follows a vowel
  • Thirteen respectful word-pairs — 집 becomes 댁, 먹다 becomes 드시다, 나이 becomes 연세
  • 110 pronunciation notes for the places where spelling and speech part ways
  • 380 usage notes for words that behave in a way English does not lead you to expect
  • 846 collocations — the phrases each word actually lives inside
  • Hangul from the first stroke: 14 consonants, 5 tense pairs, 21 vowels, 7 final sounds

There's also an app.

Same words, same sentences — except these ones speak, and they remember where you left off. You don't need it to use the book.

See what the app does

Take the book. Decide later.

It costs nothing and it's the whole thing. If the writing isn't for you, you'll know within ten pages and you won't have spent anything.