Collocation

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Hello everyone,English is not my first language and I often encounter difficulties particularly in collocations.Selecting a befitting collocation word is troublesome a bit. Can anyone here tell me any reference book for collocation? Thank you.Hiromi

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]Hello everyone, English is not my first language and I often encounter difficulties particularly in collocations. Selecting a befitting collocation word is troublesome a bit. Can anyone here tell me any reference book for collocation? Thank you.[/nq]
Well there is The Oxford Collocation Dictionary For Students Of English and Cambridge University Press's English Collocations In Use . I haven't read either of them so cannot vouch for their quality.

Andy Leighton => (Email Removed)
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials" - Robert Rankin, They Came And Ate Us

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]English is not my first language and I often encounter difficulties particularly in collocations. Selecting a befitting collocation word is troublesome a bit. Can anyone here tell me any reference book for collocation?[/nq]
Google finds 163,000 hits on the string "collocations dictionary online". Maybe one of them would be what you want.

Usenet · Answer

Read a good book or a good newspaper and you will sort them out eventually. I had to look up the word "Collocation". Never heard it before. I'm totally familiar with the problem however.

Examples.
Baggage and luggage mean the same, except you leave your bags in "Left luggage", not left baggage, and people have "emotional baggage" not emotional luggage.
You will find that the words used may differ a bit from English-speaking place to place, or country to country. There is really no such thing as "Correct" English. It's standard English.

People will say "half-yearly" results but I spent six months there. Aussies will say half-year, however.
A Yorkshire man will say "A car fetched me off my bike", but I doubt that that would be said elsewhere.
Also, there are minor grammatical differences in the standard English spoken in different countries. e.g. In Ireland (where I live), something is "different to", in Britain it's different from, in the USA different than. In Ireland "bring" and take" are used almost with the same meaning, but not elsewhere. Preposition use in modern England appears much looser than it is in Ireland, with what would have been "incorrect" prepositions being used a lot. This is just a loosening up of language, I imagine.
Get a book and use a highlighter, and revise. Are you learning American English, Brititsh English or some other flavour?

Collocation

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