Hi Students
Those of you who have been having lessons with me for a while, especially those of you who are intermediate or advanced students, know that I pay a lot of attention to teaching collocations. I also learn them a lot while doing my Swedish learning stuff.
A collocation is a combination of words that appear together relatively often in a particular language. Actually, this may sound like an idiom or a phrasal verb. This is not necessarily true. Idioms and phrasal verbs are collocations, but not all collocations are idioms or phrasal verbs.
Collocations are important because they make your language sound natural. If you master collocations, your English will be more idiomatic, that is, more similar to the way it is spoken by native speakers.
I'd like to share with you a dictionary that I have been using for the last 10 years or so, and that has greatly broadened my collocation awareness both in speaking and writing.
Attached you will find an old version of the Oxford Collocations Dictionary in an archive. Just download it and unpack it on your drive. When you've done it click the exe file in the folder to run it.
Have fun