"I Struggled Learning Korean - So I Started Using Rocket Korean"

Do you learn best through listening to spoken conversations? Rocket Korean has some of the best dialogues in the business - useful, colloquial, natural-sounding, and just plain fun. Do you need a transcript to follow? No problem! Rocket Korean Premium displays the dialogues in both Hangeul (Korean characters) and a Romanized alphabet you can read right away. Do you need engaging activities to imprint the lessons on your brain? You'll love Rocket Korean's MegaVocab and MegaAudio! They make learning Korean as enjoyable as playing your favorite video games. As you go along, track your progress with interactive quizzes and self-tests.

In the case of Korean, particularly, there are many cultural factors that impact the language itself. For instance, in English, you'd use the same phrase to ask your sister how she's feeling as you'd use if you were inquiring about the health of your boss. This is not true in Korean at all! There are many levels of politeness, and it's essential to use the right one in the right circumstances. Rocket Korean's 27 Language and Culture lessons will help you understand the unique characteristics of Korean.

But wait, I'm not done! What happens when you need the help of a real human tutor? With most programs, you'd be stuck - but not with Rocket Korean! When you purchase the full program, you'll gain access to an exclusive learner's forum moderated 24/7 by native Korean speakers. With this system, you'll learn Korean fast from the comfort of your own home!

But isn't Rocket Korean Premium kind of expensive? This program is so jam-packed with features that it would be a terrific value even if you had to pay its full retail price of $299.95. But you don't! Click here to find out how to get Rocket Korean Premium for much, much less.

Usefulness, clarity, and value - Rocket Korean Premium has it all, and it's clearly the best way to learn Korean fast.

Consumer Tip: Don't buy the Rocket Korean 20-CD pack. The only difference between the CD version and the downloadable version is that the CD version provides the audio lessons in stereo quality, where the online version provides your audio tracks in MP3 format.

Inside your member's section you have the option to buy a 2-CD backup of the course for only $19.95, and the Premium Plus level II course for $20 less.

The developers of the Byki language system distinguish between two types of memory -essentially, the memory bank that contains words and phrases you know "cold," and another type of memory that shows you what to do with them (grammar). Ideally, to learn Korean fast, it seems obvious that those two types of memory ought to be integrated as quickly as possible. But Byki's developers believe that a new student must encounter a word or phrase between 5 and 16 times before it is "locked" in the student's memory, and that these words must be "locked in" before worrying about grammar or syntax at all.

All this is well and good, but many people already know a smattering of the language they're trying to learn. Suppose you already know the word or phrase Byki is trying to teach you? It doesn't matter - you're going to have to review it over and over, until Byki's "proprietary algorithm" determines that it's locked in your declarative memory. Verbally expressive students will want to get on with the business of forming sentences before Byki is ready to let them. Needless to say, this is not a good way to learn Korean fast.

One solid advantage of Byki over audio-only systems like Pimsleur (which we'll discuss next) is its comfortable marriage of audio and text. Either auditory or visual learners would feel at home with Byki. There are visual prompts that help you connect the written word to the spoken sound to the image. And a really nice feature of Byki is its SlowSound function, which allows you to slow the speaker's voice down enough for you to interpret what he's saying. Finally, Byki's technology allows you to practice your language lessons on your iPod or mp3 player, and an app is available for the iPhone.

At less than $70, you wouldn't expect Byki Korean Deluxe 4.0 to be as full-featured as Rocket Korean Premium, and it's not - it doesn't offer culture lessons, educational video games, or lifetime online assistance. For this reason, it landed second on my list. But it is an adequate way to learn Korean fast, and for the price, Byki's introduction to basic Korean may work for the casual tourist who doesn't need anything more.

There's just one problem. As we grow, many of us develop learning styles that don't rely so heavily on what we hear. We need visual cues - in short, we need something to read. You may recall that Rocket Korean teaches the sound of the word together with its Hangeul and Romanized spelling. That way, the student can visually track what the speaker is saying, and utilize two senses rather than just one.

This is especially important in a language like Korean that is nothing whatsoever like English. Pimsleur sails past grammar without so much as a wave. Without some solid explanations of Korean's very unusual grammar and syntax, anyone trying to use Korean words to construct a sentence would be lost. And as we all know, learning a language is much more than simply being able to recognize words in a stream of conversation. Learning a language is about expressing yourself in that language, and you will not be able to do that in Korean if you don't understand its grammar. Learning Korean this way - even for auditory learners -- is too slow. You need to learn Korean fast, remember?

And what about those culture lessons offered by Rocket Korean Premium? These are critical when studying a country whose entire language is structured on politeness. Unfortunately, even though Pimsleur's instructional system calls itself comprehensive, it doesn't offer anything comparable to Rocket Korean Premium on that point. The Korean taught by Pimsleur is stilted, formal, and awkward, possibly because it seeks to offend no one; Rocket Korean, on the other hand, is a living, interactive process helps you learn Korean fast and thoroughly - not through mere repetition of canned phrases, but through an understanding of Korea's culture and soul. Because Pimsleur Digital Korean is so deficient in this area, it landed at the bottom of my list at #3.