"What is in the bowl?"
Translation:그릇에 무엇이 있어요?
14 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
I think you can turn any sentence into a question by adding a question mark but I think the 있음니까 ending for questions is more polite
뭐, 무엇, and 무슨 can all be translated to "what", however in English "what" is used in a few ways. The first two, 뭐 and 무엇, corresponds to how English uses "what" as a noun: "What is in the bowl?" or "What are we eating?". The third, 무슨, corresponds to how English uses "What [NOUN]?".
뭐, 뭘, and 무엇이 are all variants of the word 무엇 and its contraction 뭐. The words 무엇 and 뭐 are synonymous, but the former is more formal. This is similar to how "is not" is more appropriate than "isn't". The variations themselves come from whether the word is used as the subject or object of a sentence. When "what" is the subject of a sentence we use 무엇이 or 뭐.
- 그릇에 무엇이 있어요? = 그릇에 뭐 있어요? ("What is in the bowl?")
When "what" is the object of a sentence, we use 무엇을 or 뭘 (though the marker is often omited and 뭐 is used as well).
- 무엇을 보고 싶어요? = 뭘 보고 싶어요? = 뭐 보고 싶어요? ("What do you want to watch?")
Note that 무엇 and 뭐 are nouns and pronouns. The answer to these questions are nouns and pronouns themselves. In contrast, 무슨 is a determiner, so the answer to these questions are also determiners (things that act like English adjectives).
- 무슨 영화를 보고 싶어요? ("What movie do you want to watch?")
