Indirect questions trip up Korean speakers: fixing 'what is this'
Korean questions don't reorder words, so students bolt the English question pattern onto embedded clauses as one memorized block, producing "I don't know what is this" instead of "I don't know what this is."
Park English2026-10-123 min read
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You'll hear it from your best students, not just your weakest ones: "I don't know what is this." "Can you tell me where is the bathroom." "I'm not sure what time is it." The question part is perfect. The problem is where it sits.
Why this happens
In Korean, you don't flip the subject and verb to ask a question. You just add a question ending to the end of a normal sentence. "이것이 무엇입니까" is built the same way as the statement "이것은 책입니다," with a particle doing the work that word order does in English. So Korean students never learn "move the verb" as a step. They learn the whole question "What is this?" as one fixed chunk, the way you'd memorize a phrase in a phrasebook.
That works fine for a standalone question. It breaks the moment the question gets tucked inside a bigger sentence, because English has a rule most textbooks barely mention: once a question becomes part of another sentence (after "I don't know," "Can you tell me," "I wonder"), it goes back to normal word order. The question mark disappears and so does the inversion. Students have never been taught that second step exists, so they just drop the memorized chunk in whole.
The shape of the fix
| Wrong | Right | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| I don't know what is this. | I don't know what this is. | subject before verb |
| Tell me where is he. | Tell me where he is. | subject before verb |
| I'm not sure what time is it. | I'm not sure what time it is. | subject before verb |
| Do you know is she a teacher? | Do you know if she is a teacher? | add "if", normal order |
That last row is the part students miss most, and it's worth saying out loud in class: yes/no questions don't have a question word to carry inside the sentence, so English inserts "if" or "whether" to do that job. That's a separate habit from the word-order fix, so don't rush it in the same lesson if the class is still shaky on the first part.
Drills, easy to hard
- Spot the fix. Show pairs like the table above. Students just say which one sounds right. No writing yet.
- Finish the sentence. Give the embedding phrase and the question, let them combine it out loud: "I don't know ___ (Where is the library?)"
- Chain it. One student asks a normal question, the next student reports it: "She asked where the library is."
- Free write. Students write three things they genuinely don't know about their partner, using "I don't know what / where / why ___." Then they ask and find out.
Keep drill 1 purely oral the first time through. The pattern lives in the ear before it lives on paper, and middle schoolers will self-correct faster if they hear the wrong version out loud and wince at it first.