So I read A LOT of the reviews before purchasing this book. The main sentiment that I came across was that some people had an issue with how the author wrote the book. After reading it (mind you I'm only 100 pages into it) I think I figured out the problem. The author wrote this book with a heavy use of jargon; People who haven't recently taken an English grammar course or remember everything they were taught in school about direct and indirect nouns are going to have difficulty reading this. I've been out of school for about 3 years and I can't remember all the rules, but his way of explaining Korean is by comparing it to English language structure. And because of that it makes it difficult to gauge what you need from the beginning, and that's off putting, honestly. I skipped parts-I will not deny that. Some things in here I thought were unnecessary, like how the words in Korean are built/combined/derived (whatever). The book is not a standalone. Use it as a reference, as I am now. I currently use Deer-lingo as an app to teach myself Korean/Hangul and its super helpful with this book alongside it. Especially if I want more info or examples. The examples are useful the further you go in. This book will not teach you Hangul the way you need so use something else for that (its section, about 3 pages, on Hangul is more an overview and leans more toward romanization which I would not recommend as a super beginner myself and doesn't even go over sound changes which we really need). I'll probably update this review sometime later on, but so far I give it a three because I consider that a neutral opinion--its not bad, but it doesn't start out good either. My opinion is likely to change the farther in I go, especially since I skipped the exercises.