During this month, besides reviewing previous materials at the beginning of each meeting, I start learning commonly used question words in Korean and trying to form a complete questioning sentence.
When learning English, the first couple of question words we learn must be “who, what, when, where, and why”, so we start with learning how to say those 5 words in Korean. Who is “누가/누구”, what is “뭐”, when is “언제”, where is “어디”, and why is “왜”, I remember those really quickly as I always hear them while watching Korean dramas and reality shows. When forming a simple question like “why is there” or “what is there”, just add “있어” after the corresponding question words. For example, “왜있어” means “why is there”. When asking “what to do” or “where to do”, just add “했어” after the corresponding question words. For example, “뭐했어” means “what you do”.
Later I learned when asking questions in Korean about “how many”, we have to obey a rule which is related to the object we are referring to. In English, when we ask about people we just say “how many people” and if we want to ask about items we could say “how many items”, we always have to point out what we are asking for. There’s the same in Korean, there are different words for different kinds of objects we are referring to. Generally, “how many” in Korean is always “몇”, the difference appears when asking about different objects. When asking “how many people,” we say “몇명”, and when asking “how many items” we use “몇개”. It is quite obvious that “명” refers to people and “개” refers to items. However, the difference between English and Korean is that in English when asking “how many bags” and “how many desks”, it only has to change the words. In Korean, “bags” and “desks” are in the same category which is “item”, so when we have to use “몇개” in the question. For “how many bags”, we say “몇개 가방”, we don’t say “몇명 가방” since “명” refers to people. Besides words for items and people, I also learned “마리” is for animals, “권” is for books (also used for magazines, comic books, textbooks, and so on), “시” is for time, “살” is for age, “번” is for frequency, “일” is for the date, and “층” is for the floor. After learning these questions words, I’m able to write many questions. At the beginning of the last two meetings, I shared 5 questions I wrote with Vivian and she said my grammar is mostly correct and taught me the correct way to form a more complex question. For example, I wrote the question “how many books are there in your bag?” (몇권 책 가방있어?), the correct sentence should be “가방에 책 몇권있어?”, where I should put the object “bag” at the first since that is the object I mainly want to refer to and have the question word “몇권” at last before the verb “있어”.
Comments
Hello! I think this is a really good idea as the 5 W's are so commonly used in questions. Something similar I did which I would recommend is when doing vocab, try to learn some questions in that topic. For example, when I was learning vocab on food I learned "I would like to order..." and "can I have a menu", things like this can be really helpful for expanding your conversational skills which it seems like you are working towards.