[.ca] NTC's Compact Korean and English Dictionary (ISBN 0844283614)

Too expensive and ineffective:
English-Korean is all right, but the Korean-English section is terribly confusing. Since the dictionary uses hangul, why are the Korean words alphabetized according to the romanizations? For a beginning Korean student, learning the hangul alphabetical order is challenge enough. Add a seemingly erratic romanization (there is no one standard system of writing Korean words in Roman letters), and you have a very confused student! For this much money, find a dictionary that is strictly hangul without confusing romanizations.

This book is great for people who want to learn Korean:
I received this book the other day and in my opinion it was everything I hoped it would be. It suprised me because unlike other books it supplied with approximately 20,000 common words both in Korean and English reference. Those of you who are learning Korean or English would find this a great help.

Romanizing Korean is a bad habit:
I second Minerva Rheault's motion: Romanizing Korean is not a good idea. However, my objection is somewhat different--any serious student of the Korean language will eventually look up items which are not in this dictionary. The sooner that student learns the Korean alphabet, the better. Would you serve a drink to an alcoholic? If not, then don't serve Romanization to a student of the Korean language.

Romanized hangeul: YUCK! Short entries without examples.:
In the process of learning seven languages I've used many dictionaries and this is the worst I've ever seen. This is a real shame because it's the only Korean-English dictionary I've seen directed towards a native English speaker learning Korean. Those directed towards Koreans completely ignore issues a native English speaker might have. The completely romanized format is very frustrating. It's fine for English to Korean, but useless if you want to look up a Korean word. Most students of Korean learn hangeul within the first week of a Korean language course, so learning romanization is just an annoying step backwards. And for those who haven't learned the very simple hangeul, why force them to learn how to romanize a Korean word they might see on a sign or in a menu when that energy would be better spent learning how to look the word up directly in hangeul. The entries themselves are so short, so devoid of examples and consideration of idiomatic meanings to be almost useless. I know this is meant to be a very basic dictionary, but it has been stripped too far. Context must be taken into particular consideration with the Korean language, because of its notoriously case specific nature.

A very complete Korean-English-Korean dictionary.:
I found the text to really hold up to high standards as far as having fairly clear translations, also all words are written in the Korean character set as well as the translated phonetic form. It also includes a nice summary of the transcription system to make learning easier.