つかえる英会話Daily / Travel

Claire: Dr. Sutherland, you told us how important it is to have our own vocabulary book and study new words thoroughly. My question now is, how can we learn collocations?

Sutherland: You are a truly wonderful interviewer! Yes, collocations are vital. When you’ve acquired certain words…by “acquiring” I mean the level where “the meaning of a word jumps to your mind the moment you see or hear it”…your listening or reading skills have also improved. But your writing or speaking skills won’t develop further unless you know collocations of these words.

Claire: Yes.

Sutherland: Let me get back to your question…how we learn collocations…my advice is, again, use your vocab book.

Claire: But how?

Sutherland: The easiest way of doing it is to use a collocations dictionary. You write collocations of words you are learning in your word book, and again, study them thoroughly. You can memorize them by muttering the collocations to yourself, or you can write them over and over. But the problem with this method is that it could be boring.

Claire: Boring?

Sutherland: Yes. Collocations given in dictionaries are correct, but they’re not “real”. If you want to make your collocations study more exciting, you ought to expose yourself to tons of “real” material of your own interest…books, movies, newspapers, Web sites, whatever at hand provided in the language you’re learning. And when you see or hear a set of words you’ve never seen or heard…or those you think sound “cool”…write them down in your vocab book. Don’t just copy an adjective and a noun, but copy the whole sentence or phrase. “Real” examples of your interest would remain in your memory better, because you have attachment to them. Now, I’d like to speak about what I call the “motivation issue”.