Collocations
Why I stopped learning one word at a time and started learning chunks.
⏱ About 5 min read
There was a phase where my vocabulary was decent, my grammar was not wrong, and my sentences still came out slightly off. Readers understood them, but nobody says it that way.
Something I once wrote: "I want to make a decision about this problem" — that one is fine. But I also wrote "do a decision", "big rain", "powerful coffee". All three are grammatical and all three are wrong.
It should be make a decision, heavy rain, strong coffee. No rule explains why. That is just what people say.
English is assembled from chunks, not words
This is an idea I got from Michael Lewis, who wrote The Lexical Approach in 1993. Cambridge has a free summary of chunk-based learning, quicker than reading the whole book.
His point: native speakers do not build sentences from grammar plus vocabulary. They pull out whole chunks already stored in their heads.
"I'd like to make a reservation" is not assembled on the spot. It comes out as one block.
That explained two things I had never understood:
- Why native speakers talk fast without thinking — they are retrieving, not calculating.
- Why I knew many words and still spoke slowly — I was assembling one brick at a time.
Four kinds of chunk worth noticing
| Kind | Example | Why collect it |
|---|---|---|
| Collocations | heavy rain, make a decision, strong accent | Not predictable from the individual words |
| Phrasal verbs | put up with, run into, come across | The whole means something other than its parts |
| Fixed expressions | to be honest, as far as I know, the thing is | Usable immediately, almost impossible to get wrong |
| Sentence frames | It's not that ..., it's just that ... | One frame serves hundreds of ideas |
The fourth kind is the highest return. Learn one frame, use it forever.
How I changed my cards
My Anki card used to be: one word, one meaning.
Now, for each new word, I also collect 3 to 5 chunks it habitually appears in.
For decision:
- make a decision
- reach a decision
- a tough decision
- reverse a decision
- the decision to (do something)
Those five lines taught me far more than "decision = quyết định". And more importantly: they taught me exactly the places where I would otherwise have mistranslated from Vietnamese.
Cloze cards
The front is a real sentence with exactly one gap:
They had to ____ a difficult decision.
I don't have to recall what decision means. I have to recall which word goes with it. That is the thing I was actually missing.
How I check whether a chunk is real
When I'm not sure people say something, I don't guess. I look it up.
| Tool | For | Address |
|---|---|---|
| Collocation dictionary | Which verbs and adjectives a noun takes | ozdic.com |
| SkELL | Real corpus sentences, plus frequent partners | skell.sketchengine.eu |
| YouGlish | Hear real people say the exact phrase on video | youglish.com |
| Google in quotes | Compare result counts between two phrasings | — |
The Google method: search "make a decision", then "do a decision", and compare the counts. A
difference of thousands of times settles it. Crude but fast, and it is the one I use most.
Don't trust one-way translation
The most dangerous chunks are the ones that translate smoothly out of your own language.
"Mình rất thích nó" → I used to write "I very like it". Correct by Vietnamese logic, completely wrong in English.
"Mở đèn" → "open the light". It has to be turn on the light.
These are not grammar errors, so a grammar book cannot fix them. Only meeting them often and collecting them can.
Where to find chunks
You don't need a separate source. They are already sitting in what you listen to and read — your eyes used to skate over them because they are made of familiar words.
Once I started paying attention, I changed the question I ask while reading. It used to be "which word don't I know?". Now there is a second one: "which phrase do I understand instantly but would never have produced myself?"
The second question yields far more valuable cards than the first.
Sources for this page
- Lewis, M. (1993). The Lexical Approach. Language Teaching Publications. — the original idea that English is assembled from ready-made chunks.
- Cambridge University Press. Learning language in chunks. — the free summary, 20 minutes to read.
- Lookup tools: ozdic · SkELL · YouGlish