Make your English sound more natural: Collocations

6 years ago

What are collocations?
A collocation is a natural combination of words that occurs in all languages. Idioms (or idiomatic expressions) are also a special type of collocation which includes two or more words.

Will I become more fluent if I use collocations?
Absolutely! Learning and using collocations will help you to speak and write English in a more natural and accurate way. People will probably understand what you mean if you talk about "making your homework", but your language will sound unnatural and it might be confusing. 

Learning collocations will also help you to increase your range of vocabulary and use words that fit the context better and have a more precise meaning. Not being able to express exactly what you want to express can be very frustrating sometimes. So, here are some examples of collocations.

"A sharp pain"
"A useful piece of advice"
"Desperately worried"
"Meet the requirements"
"Leading a (lonely/exciting/etc.) life"
"Make an effort"
"A key factor"
"Highly unusual"

Try to make sentences with these collocations and see for yourself how useful they can be.

Do you know other collocations?