HOW TO LEARN COMMON COLLOCATIONS

Collocations are formed with two words that go together, they are usually a word (noun/adjective/verb) + noun. It is important to know that some words go together “just because”, even though at first sight, the words can seem to be synonyms. For this reason we say speak a language and not talk a language. We say watch TV and not see TV. Try our vocabulary learning method (HERE) to improve your use of collocations and also our exercises in PDF (HERE).

NOUN + NOUN:

City centre, sports centre, toy shop, clothes shop, shopping trip, football fan, parking space, heart problem, travel arrangements, tower block, department store, car park

ADJECTIVE + NOUN:

Luxury hotel, personal privacy, available time, good idea, important exam, recent studies, urban environment, fast food, lucky day, fun time, wide world, recent event

VERB + NOUN:

Watch TV, speak a language, go on holiday, read the news, listen to music, speak on the phone, make a mistake, miss the bus, make arrangements, do exercise, surf the internet

DOWNLOAD THIS POST IN PDF COMMON COLLOCATIONS

A great way to improve collocations is to take a key word like KEEP, GO, STAY or TAKE and write all of the collocations that you know with that collocation. Every time you see a new collocation with that word, you should write it down. HERE are some ideas to learn new vocabulary.

The difficult part about this is that there are an almost uncountable amount of collocations that you need to learn and memorize. If you mistake a collocation and say something incorrectly like hear music, it is not the end of the world, it just doesn´t sound right. Try looking at our vocabulary topics in our resource section (HERE)