I have asked this question to or of a lot of people.

[tufguy]

1) I have asked this question to a lot of people.
2) I have asked this question of a lot of people.

I know what you are going to say. As a non native speaker sometimes you say something and you get stuck. You just cannot rephrase you sentence because it sounds so awkward so incase if someone says something like this then what should be the correct preposition here?

 

[Annabel Lee]

1) I have asked this question to a lot of people.
2) I have asked this question of a lot of people.

Neither sentence is well formed. We don't ask questions to people, but we can direct questions to them:

1a) I have directed this question to a lot of people.​

And while we can ask things of people, the "things" are requests, not questions. With (2), you need an indirect object:

2a) I have asked a lot of people this question.​

 

[emsr2d2]

I know what you are going to say.

Then why did you ask us?

As a non-native English speaker, sometimes you try to say something and but you get stuck. You just cannot rephrase your sentence because it sounds so very awkward so, incase in case if someone says wants to say something like this, then what should would be the correct preposition here?

Note my corrections above.

 

[tufguy]

Then why did you ask us?

Reply is actually different from what I was expecting.

 

[emsr2d2]

The reply is actually different from what I was expecting.

I don't understand. In post #1, you said "I know what you are going to say". What did you think (when you wrote post #1) that we were going to say?

 

[tufguy]

I don't understand. In post #1, you said "I know what you are going to say". What did you think (when you wrote post #1) that we were going to say?

I thought you would ask me to use "of" here.