Collocations: What Are They and How to Learn Them?
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What Is Collocation?
????Collocation is a term used to refer to the expected co-occurrence of words. This is a reference to the fact that words are often used in predictable groups or pairs by native speakers of a language. For example, you can predict the missing word in the sentence “Walking at a __ pace burns about 300 calories an hour on average.” to be ‘brisk.’ A collocation, however, is not the same as a set phrase since the missing word could just as well be ‘quick’ or ‘fast,’ whereas you can’t replace the word ‘mile’ in the phrase ‘walk a mile in one’s shoes' with ‘kilometer.’ In other words, there is variety in collocations but set phrases are invariable.
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Why Do We Have to Learn Collocations?
????If you don’t use collocations, people will still understand you, sure. Not using accurate collocations isn’t even technically a mistake. But if you don’t use them, you are going to stick out as a foreigner like a sore thumb. Using accurate collocations makes your use of language natural and will help you fit in better and build rapport with native speakers.
How do I Learn Correct Collocations?
????Thankfully there are many excellent sources available for learning collocations. My personal recommendations are the English Collocations in Use series from Cambridge and macmillandictionary.com. The former can be used to find useful vocabulary and collocations regarding a specific topic. Just pick something you want to work on and find the relevant chapter in the table of contents. the website can be used to find accurate collocations for individual words. Each entry is divided by word type. For instance, If you look up the word population (‘population’ being a noun), you will be offered adjectives and verbs whereas if you look for collocations for a verb, you’ll get nouns, adverbs, propositions, and other verbs frequently used with it.
Beyond Collocations
In poetry and other such literary texts, frequent collocation patterns are often abandoned and new unexpected alliances between words are formed. This, however, is not recommended for beginners as its successful execution requires a deeply intuitive grasp of the language. Nevertheless, the adept language user can move beyond collocations to new, unexplored, and exciting realms.