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Transcript: Hi, there, Steve Kaufmann here, talking again about language learning. Today, I’m going to talk about collocations, phrasal verbs and other so-called language hacks. Before I do that, I should say if you like hearing me talk about language learning, if you have some requests -- there was a request for me to do a video Chinese and I may just do that -- let me know what you’d like to hear. Also, subscribe if you like the channel and come and visit us at LingQ. I should also point out that I have started a separate channel here at KZfaq where I do my political rants and I’ll leave a link in the description box.
For people who study English, there are books on collocations and phrasal verbs. I have them. I didn’t bring it here to show you, but I looked through it and the idea is presented by language teachers that somehow if we focus on collocations. There are many websites that tell teachers how to teach collocations and the same is true with phrasal verbs, get in, get off, get it. There are books with lists of these phrasal verbs and the idea is that somehow there is a special phenomenon called collocations or phrasal verbs and if you somehow master these then you’re English will improve. I don’t believe it.
It’s one thing to focus on something that performs a particular function in a language like so-called modal verbs, would, could, should, might. Yes, it’s a good idea to study those in some kind of concentrated form so you get a sense of the pattern of how those are used. In romance languages it’s a good idea to concentrate, at times, on the subjective or in Slavic languages on verbs of motion because those are specific functional patterns, very defined. Collocations, which means, by the way, words that are normally used together or phrasal verbs, which is a form of collocation because certain verbs are used with certain prepositions and they have a certain specific meaning.
These are potentially endless and I don’t think if you read a book of collocations or a book of phrasal verbs that you will retain much. Rather, it’s a matter of paying attention when you are listening, reading and getting used to hearing certain words used with other words. Of course if you’re on LingQ you save phrases that you think are useful to you and many of these phrases will be collocations, words that are normally used together.
In fact, at LingQ if you save a word you will see a number of phrases that other LingQ members have saved and some of those might be useful phrases for you to save. As you save these phrases, maybe review them in flashcards and notice them in different contexts when reading or listening, you’ll start to have these chunks that you can use. These chunks may well be what some of the language teachers would call collocations or phrasal verbs, but really there’s no shortcut, there is no hack. In order to use to using these phrases effectively, you simply have to do a lot of listening and reading.
So that’s my take on collocations, phrasal verbs and other language hacks. Thanks for listening, bye for use.