Use Collocations to Build English Fluency

Do you notice anything strange about these four expressions?

🟠 Say the truth
🟠 Do a mistake
🟠 Say my opinion
🟠 Give an exam

They all have a verb + determiner + noun combination so they are grammatically correct. But a fluent English speaker would say they "sound wrong". 

This is probably the most frustrating feedback that an English learner can be given - to be told that something sounds wrong. Let’s look at what that feedback really means in this case.

The nouns truth, mistake, opinion and exam all have a strong link to particular verbs. This means they pair naturally with certain verbs and not others. These strong links between nouns and verbs are called collocations and there are hundreds of them in English. (There are also other types of collocations too but that’s a subject for another post 😊.)

When fluent English speakers hear noun + verb combinations that aren’t collocations, they sound unnatural to them and therefore wrong. 

There isn’t really any logic to these collocations, it’s just how the English language has evolved over history. The most effective way to learn collocations is to learn the whole expression (the verb and the noun together) and then to put it into a sentence. Your brain will absorb the vocabulary much faster that way and you’ll be more likely to remember it.

Here are the correct verb + noun collocations from the original four expressions:

🟢 Tell the truth
🟢 Make a mistake
🟢 Give my opinion
🟢 Take an exam

And here are some sample sentences using those collocations:

🔵 If you tell the truth, everything will be okay.
🔵 Check everything carefully because you don’t want to make a mistake.
🔵 I’m going to give my opinion about the proposed changes.
🔵 I have to take an exam to get my qualification.

Being aware of collocations, and learning them in this way, will help you to build your English fluency faster and more effectively. This is something I explore in sessions with all of my clients.

Header Image by Kelsy Gagnebin on Unsplash