On a community website where I spend a lot of time, someone asked recently for advice on how to deal with his noisy neighbours. He doesn't live in Korea, but he thought that the couple next door was Korean, and that when they were shouting at each other in the wee hours, they weren't shouting in English. He reasonably took this as an indication that some knowledge of their cultural background could come in handy if he girded his loins enough to talk to them about it.

There are, to put it bluntly, a lot of ESL textbooks for adult learners that are, to varying degrees, crap. There are many and varied reasons why these books are awful. Many of them are weighed down under more than one layer of language guano. You're waist-deep before you even get started, digging through the stink to find something useful.

I can count on one hand the number of English teachers I've met in the ten years since I first came to Korea who were actually certified teachers back in their home country. If the proportion topped 2%, I'd be shocked.

This is Part Two in a multipart series of articles covering the basics of reading and writing in Korean. By the end, you should be merrily sounding out anything you run across (and doing it with better pronunciation than most foreigners I've met who've been here for years).