On COLLOCATIONS

Last week we did some class work on word pairs and collocations. Collocations are words that "collocate" together: they usually come as a pair and it is important to learn these word chunks as lexical units as it will make a huge difference to how natural you sound when speaking English. So, whenever you learn a new word in English, try to learn the words that go together with it at the same time. For instance, we Spanish "ponemos la mesa". But do English-speaking people "put the table"? I don't think so! I don't mean that they're lazy and don't do any housework: the problem here is that the collocation is different in English and in Spanish. It would then be advisable to learn the words together "to lay the table" or "to set the table" so as to avoid making this kind of mistake. Try to make a concious effort in the future to make note of these collocations whenever you are learning a new word. Do not learn new words, learn new word chunks! By the way, do you "do an effort" or "make an effort"?

There is a dictionary which is very helpful to become aware of common collocations. It is the OXFORD Dictionary of Collocations, which looks like this:

You can find the online version, which is free, here: 5yiso.appspot.com Look up "effort" and answer my question above, or just re-read this entry to find out.

Along the same lines, there is a series of self-study books by Cambridge for those of you who want to put some extra work into your studies. It's called English Collocations in Use. Units are classified by theme: