"Go to home" and "go home": why Korean students add articles where English drops them

We've marked "go to the home" on a whiteboard a thousand times. The student nods, writes it again the next week. It's not carelessness. Korean requires a location particle every time you state where something happens: 집에 (house-to), 학교에서 (school-at). Your student's brain treats "home," "school," "church," and "work" as places that need markers, because in Korean they do. English is the odd one out—it drops the article when you're using the place for its normal purpose.

The difference is function versus building. "I go to school" means you go there to study. "I go to the school" means the physical building, maybe to pick someone up. "He's at work" means employed and working. "He's at the work site" means a specific location. Korean doesn't make that distinction in the same way, so the student adds an article by default.

This shows up most often with: home, school, work, church, hospital (as a patient), prison (as an inmate), bed, and university/college. All of them drop the article when you're doing the expected thing there.

The function test

Give students this pair:

• "She goes to church on Sundays." (to pray, the usual reason)
• "She goes to the church to use the photocopier." (the building, not the function)

Then this one:

• "He's in hospital." (British English, as a patient)
• "He's in the hospital visiting his dad." (not a patient, just visiting the place)

Ask: in the first sentence of each pair, is the person doing the normal thing? If yes, no article. If they're there for a different reason, add "the."

American English always uses "the hospital" even for patients, but the rule holds everywhere else: to bed, at university, in prison (serving time) versus "I drove past the prison."

The drill that sticks

Put twenty sentences on the board, half right and half wrong. Students mark each one C (correct) or X (wrong). If wrong, they rewrite it. Do not give them the rule first. Let them figure out the pattern.

After they've done ten, stop and ask what pattern they see. Someone will get close. Then give them the function rule.

Second round: give them a place and two reasons. They write two sentences.

• School: to study / to vote in an election

→ I go to school. / I went to the school to vote.

• Hospital: as a patient / to visit someone

→ She's in hospital. / She's in the hospital visiting her mum.

• Work: doing your job / attending a meeting at someone else's office

→ He's at work. / He's at the work site inspecting the foundation.

What won't work

Do not just tell them "home, school, work don't take articles." They'll memorise the list, then say "I'm at the office" when they mean their normal workplace, because "office" wasn't on the list. The rule is function, not a vocabulary set.

Do not drill this with beginners. They don't have enough control of articles generally to handle the exception. This is for mid-intermediate students who are already using "a/an/the" correctly most of the time and now need the edge cases.

One more gap

"University" and "college" work the same way in British English but not American. In the US, you say "in college" (no article, function) but "at the university" or "at university" depending on register. If your students are preparing for American standardised tests, flag this one as variable and tell them to match whatever the test uses. For everyday speech, "at university" is safe everywhere.

The particle transfer from Korean is strong. Expect to correct this for months. But once the function test clicks, it sticks.