Koryo Books is located in the Manhattan mini-neighborhood of Koreatown.

I went there in 2010 and found a book to help me learn the Korean alphabet. It was a good thing, too; I had reached dead ends in both of the textbooks I was using at the time, because they didn’t give the student (me) enough work on the alphabet before proceeding to use it. (This is a common problem with self-study books for languages with other alphabets.)

The materials the bookstore had were totally different from what I had found at Barnes & Noble. I strongly recommend visiting foreign-language bookstores (if you can find them) when you are studying another language. That becomes even more important if you are studying a less commonly studied language such as Korean, for which the offerings in a mainstream chain bookstore aren’t likely to be robust.

Still, the language-learning materials I saw in Koryo had their drawbacks. They appeared to have been written primarily by non-native speakers of English. Also, some of them had to have been really old, because they were accompanied by cassette tapes. Even in the dark ages of 2010, that was a little backwards.

The book I ended up buying was entitled Step by Step Korean Penmanship, with a happy student on the cover. And a cassette tape stuck to the back. I never used the cassette, but the book was fun.

The store’s website is in Korean.