'Many homeworks' and other fake plurals Korean students make
Korean students add -s to words like homework, furniture, and advice because Korean plural marking is optional and English countability rules don't exist in their first language. Here's the fix, with drills.
Park English2026-11-032 min read
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You will hear it in week one and you will hear it in month ten: "I have many homeworks." "My house has many furnitures." "Give me some advices." It is one of the most stubborn habits in a Korean English classroom, and it comes from a real difference in how the two languages count things.
Why this happens
In Korean, the plural marker 들 (deul) is optional. You can say 숙제 (homework) for one piece or a hundred pieces, and nobody blinks. Korean also uses counters instead of plural endings: 숙제 세 개 (homework, three things), 가구 두 개 (furniture, two things). Nothing in that system tells a student that English splits nouns into two families: ones you can count one by one (book, chair, apple) and ones you treat as a mass (homework, furniture, advice, information, money).
So when a Korean student learns "add -s for more than one," they apply it everywhere, because in their own language, marking plural is a free choice, not a rule tied to the type of noun. The mistake isn't carelessness. It's a student correctly applying an English rule to nouns that happen to be exceptions.
The line to repeat in class
Tell them: "Some English words are like rice. You don't count rice one by one, you just have 'rice' or 'a lot of rice.' Homework is like rice." Kids who have never thought about mass versus count nouns in their own language usually get this the first time, because rice (쌀) is genuinely never counted grain by grain in Korean either.
The nouns that trip them up most
| Wrong | Right |
|---|---|
| many homeworks | a lot of homework |
| some furnitures | some furniture |
| many advices | a lot of advice |
| three informations | some information |
| many moneys | a lot of money |
Keep the list to five words at this level. Adding more just invites memorization instead of understanding.
Drills, easy to hard
- Circle it. Give ten sentences, half correct, half wrong ("I have two apples" vs "I have two homeworks"). Students circle only the wrong ones.
- Fix it. Students rewrite the wrong sentences from drill 1 without the -s.
- Choose the frame. Students pick "How many ___?" or "How much ___?" for a list of ten nouns (students, furniture, books, money, pencils, advice).
- Build it. Students write one true sentence about their own house or school using each of the five words in the table, correctly.
- Catch the teacher. Say five sentences out loud, some with the extra -s on purpose. Students raise a hand only when they hear a mistake. This works well as a quick five-minute warmup once the main lesson is done.
By drill 5, most classes start correcting each other before you finish the sentence, which is the real sign the rule has landed.