Amazon.com description: Product Description: Over forty years in the making and written by one of the foremost authorities on East Asian languages, no other book can compare with A Reference Grammar of Korean in scope or reliability. This work is destined to become the standard reference on Korean for years to come. Concentrating on the Korean language as it is spoken in contemporary North and South Korea, this work is invaluable for students of modern Korean. Sections on the history of Middle Korean, dating from the fifteenth century, as well as detailed descriptions of the influence and use of Chinese characters and vocabulary, make it essential reading for advanced students, linguists, and historians. Chapters include: explanation of various romanization systems, historical overview of phonological developments, Chinese vocabulary and characters, number constructions and counting systems, detailed listings of parts of speech and their functions, description of verb stems and endings, and explanation of sentence construction and translation difficulties. Detailed appendixes include: lists of Korean surnames, place names, radical names, and stem shapes and a thorough index that makes the book easy to use.