writing an essay brought some grammar questions
I've been writing essays for the past week, and I'm still in the midst of essay hell as it were... But something interesting I'm seeing is the reaction of the Koreans I'll talk to (using HelloTalk) when I tell them I'm writing an essay.
The question they always ask is "What about essay?"
What about essay
A pronoun, a preposition, a noun, but no verb. Do sentences like this exist in Korean? I've always been told every Korean sentence has to end in either a verb or an adjective, but neither of those elements are present in this quasi-English-composed question. I'll tell them the correct way to ask this is to say
"What is your essay about?"
(Or "What is the essay about?" if you so prefer). Whenever I tell them this though, they usually brush aside my explanation as if the sentence they had originally stated was already similar, and I'm simply being finicky. I could understand if the determiner "the/your" was omitted, being that it bears little existence in the Korean language that I've seen so far, but to completely ignore the verb "is" seems bizarre to me, seeing that in Korean the verb is as undeniably needed as it is in English.
It's kind of a strange happenstance. On another note, I've started using 있다 more than 이다 in my written Korean lately, to the point that I'm starting to supersede one for the other on a whim, which has some pretty strange results, as one could imagine. By the way, does anyone know why 자고 있어요 means "I'm sleeping" when the verb 있다 means "to have/ to be in a location." Seems that 이다 would be more appropriate, but I know this isn't correct. It's kind of cute actually, because I always imagine 자고 있어요 being literally translated as "I've got the sleepies," something my younger sister will say to me when she's really tired.
