Why Korean Students Drop 'It' and 'There' From English Sentences
Korean students drop "it" and "there" because Korean sentences don't need a dummy subject to be grammatical — the real subject can sit anywhere or disappear entirely, so direct translation produces sentences like "Is raining" or "Has many students."
Park English2026-09-053 min read
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You've heard it a hundred times. A student looks out the window and says "Is raining." Another describes a photo and says "Has many people in the park." Neither sentence is a fluke, and neither student is being lazy. They're translating a sentence pattern that works fine in Korean and breaks in English.
Why this happens
Korean is what linguists call a pro-drop language. You can leave out a subject entirely if it's obvious from context, and the sentence is still grammatical. 비가 와요 literally means "rain comes" — rain is the subject, doing the raining, and there's no separate placeholder word standing in for nothing. English can't do that. English verbs need a subject slot filled even when there's nothing real to put there, so we invented "it" and "there" just to occupy the space. Nothing in Korean prepares a student for a subject that doesn't refer to anything.
The existential pattern causes a second, related problem. In Korean, "there are many students" comes out as 학생이 많아요, which puts students in the subject position and pairs it with the adjective 많다 (to be many). Translated word for word, that gives you "Students are many" — a sentence English speakers understand but would never actually say. The real English pattern buries the located noun after "there are," which has no Korean equivalent at all.
Where it shows up
| Korean thought | Student's English | What we want |
|---|---|---|
| 비가 와요 (rain comes) | "Is raining." / "Rain comes." | "It's raining." |
| 학생이 많아요 (students are many) | "Students are many." | "There are many students." |
| 이거 중요해요 (this is important) | "Study is important." | "It's important to study." |
| 시간이 없어요 (time doesn't exist) | "Have no time." | "There's no time." / "I don't have time." |
Notice the third row isn't wrong exactly — it's just not the anticipatory-subject pattern native speakers default to. That one's less urgent to fix than the flat-out ungrammatical dropped subject in row one.
Drills that actually help
- Weather chain drill. Go around the room. Each student adds one weather sentence using "it." Rainy, sunny, cold, windy, humid — Korea's four seasons give you plenty of material, and July gives you an easy one for "It's so humid today."
- There is / there are sort. Give a messy classroom picture and have pairs write eight sentences describing it, every one starting with "There is" or "There are." Ban any sentence that starts with the object itself.
- Correction pairs. Write ten broken sentences on the board pulled straight from the table above, minus the "correct" column. Students fix them in pairs, then check against your key.
- Say it fast. Oral drill, no writing. You say a Korean-pattern prompt ("Many students in this school"), student fires back the correct English version within three seconds. Speed forces the pattern into muscle memory instead of leaving it as a grammar rule they can recite but not use.
One honest caveat: older students who've had years of grammar-translation classes sometimes know the rule perfectly on a worksheet and still say "Is raining" the moment they're not thinking about it. That gap between knowing and doing is normal, and it closes with repetition, not with a better explanation.