It’s of extremely limited utility to try to learn Hanja—it’s used very rarely these days and won’t help you at all in speaking, listening, and in 99% of situations, reading. If you actually mean hangul, the Korean alphabet, that’s essential, and relatively easy.

There are very few books I’ve found over the years that are any damn good at all—mostly written by Koreans, they follow the typical Korean way of doing things, which is throw it in a bucket, shake, and pour out.

The one book that has been useful to me is the American Foreign Service Institute’s book. The downside of it is that it uses a phonetic system for the first part of the book, rather than forcing you to learn the alphabet, but it is well-structured and comprehensive. It’s in the public domain, and I offer it for download, along with the mp3 files, at one of my sites.

The trick with pronunciation, by the way, is to recognize that in all but a few consistent situations based on character position within syllables and the initial character of the next syllable (and these exceptions are very few), a single character (or character combination, for some vowels) expresses a single sound. Most foreign residents here in Korea mess up their pronunciation because they impose the kind of pronunciation that the romanization of a Korean word would suggest, the English-style pronunciation of the syllables, when in fact 9 times out of 10, that pronunciation is a very poor approximation of the actual sound in question.

There are a few sounds in Korean that don’t really map over into English very well, but once you get those sorted, you’ll be good.

Let’s Speak Korean is a pretty good site for getting started with the basic sounds and how they go together.

Good luck! My Korean is still pretty rudimentary after all these years in Korea—if there were classes I could take or decent books, it’d probably be better (and also if I weren’t so damn lazy)—but my pronunciation, at least, is pretty good. The grammar is the hardest part, but a few dozen common phrases and clauses and structures will get you pretty far.

A cultural note, too: Koreans, older ones especially, find it almost impossible to understand foreigners who speak with anything but a flawless accent. My theory for why this might be—where for most Canadians or Americans or whatever, it’s not all that hard to figure out what someone’s trying to say in broken English—is that until recently there were literally almost no foreigners who actually spoke the language. For most people, growing up here, there were literally no opportunities to hear anyone speak Korean who was not a native speaker. People simply didn’t develop the skills for listening to less-than-perfect pronunciation, even with regional dialectical differences, which follow consistent patterns. As a result, trying to learn to speak Korean in Korea without blank stares or outright laughter (which is discouraging to say the least) is damn hard.

Contrast that with growing up in North America, where from an early age, we are totally accustomed to meeting, hearing and speaking with people for whom English is a second language. It becomes part of our language toolkit to decipher what people are saying.

So, yeah. If Korean folks poopoo your pronunciation, don’t take that entirely to heart. They may not be aware of it, but their standards are far more exacting than yours or mine, probably.

If you have any specific questions, feel free to drop me a MeMail or an email, and I’ll try to answer them if I can.

Credits:
Learn-Korean.net
LinguaGuide.com
KoreaDirect.com
SuperiorPapers.com
EzyDictionary.com