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I can't seem to find an answer to this question anywhere, and I'm trying to explain it to one of my adult ESL students. I understand the rules of reported speech, but what about saying "I/we talked about..."? I realized, when I said some example sentences to her, that we often use words such as "what" or "how" after this phrase, as in "We talked about how important it was to wash our hands" or "I talked about what I was going to do on the weekend." I'm especially confused about how to explain the use of "how." Can anyone help me? Thank you very much!

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    I don't understand the confusion. Why do they not make sense? They are noun phrases. The specific function of how in this context (for instance) is to act as a conjunction. What is the objection to their use that is being raised?
    – Jason Bassford
    Commented Jun 25, 2020 at 20:32
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    It may work to teach the question version first—How important is it? What are you going to do? And then switch to the “Talk about” version.
    – Xanne
    Commented Jun 25, 2020 at 21:37
  • I think you're confusing yourself with the idiom "how important". In the more general case: "We talked about how to mow the lawn". "We talked about what to use to mow the lawn." In the first case you're talking about a process, while in the second it's about an object.
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Jun 26, 2020 at 2:31
  • There is a specific SE site for learners of English called English Language Learners. Questions like this should be posted there, not here.
    – David
    Commented Jun 26, 2020 at 19:14

1 Answer 1

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What and how are Wh-words, interrogative forms that introduce a certain type of subordinate clause, called an "embedded question complement", which can be the direct object of communication predicates like talk about.

  • We discussed/decided/talked about/argued over [what we should do]/[how we should do it]

It isn't that we use these words after talk about so much as we use these clauses a lot after predicates like these. Language isn't a matter of stringing words together; it's constructions, like object clauses.

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