How to check expressions in English like a pro
Imagine that you are reading the text and stumbled upon an interesting new phrase. Do you always know how to pronounce it correctly and use it in speech? Or, for example, you are writing a letter and cannot decide if you used the expression correctly. These situations are typical for English learners. What do you usually do? Chances are you open Google and maybe even use quotation marks when searching. Not a bad strategy, but there are better alternatives. My name is Daria, I teach English at EPAM, and in this article I will talk about effective approaches and tools for finding examples of the use of vocabulary.
How can you be sure that the examples you find are up-to-date and reliable? Let’s start with the obvious. If you want context in which phrases are used rather than lengthy discussions, there is a little trick – just go to the tab News google search and you will find many examples with your phrase from different articles. Although this is the fastest and easiest option, it will not be superfluous to skim through the sources – if there are well-known publications like The guardian or The New York Times, this is a good sign. But if the list contains only a couple of examples from dubious Internet magazines, perhaps it is worth continuing your search.
For example, you can open the tab Books… There you will find results from books and, accordingly, more confidence in the reliability of the source.
If you want something more than just text, I advise you to pay attention to two excellent sites – Youglish and Tubequizardlooking for your phrase from a Youtube video. That is, you get not only context, but you can also hear examples of use in speech. How much more reliable? It’s great that here you can also focus on pronunciation. Want to know how native speakers of American, British or Australian English pronounce a phrase? Now it won’t be difficult.
A similar but even more fun way to listen to live examples is to use the site Playphrase.me… The main difference from the previous options is that Playphrase finds results in movies. Unfortunately, not so long ago, this site has ceased to be completely free, but it still works and shows three examples for each search query in the free version.
“So wait, what about the Reverso Context?” – perhaps many have now thought. After all, this is the first result if you look for examples of using phrases in Google. Of course, you can use it too, but the results may contain errors, since the examples will be mostly subtitled, including unofficial and unverified ones. So, a better strategy is to use more reliable sites to find examples. For example, online corpora.
Housing (corpus) Is “a set of texts selected and processed according to certain rules, used as a basis for the study of the language.” They are usually used by linguists for their scientific needs, so when you use them, you can say that you yourself are scientists in some way. There are many good cases, but the most popular are these:
Personally, I would recommend FrazeIt – a very good site where you can see not only the example, but also the source where it was taken from. You can even click on it and read the entire article. But this is not the only advantage! There are also definitions, synonyms, and pictures to help you remember the phrase you are checking. And at the bottom there is a built-in Youglish page and you can listen to examples right away.
In case you want to compare two or more phrases in order to understand which one is correct or more frequently used, Google Books Ngram Viewer – your choice. This corpus allows you to check how often words and phrases appear in over 5 million books. The results are clearly presented in the form of a graph, and here you can read more about the capabilities of this tool.
Today, any person studying English (and any other foreign language) should strive to be autonomous – able to independently find answers to emerging questions. Gone are the days when the teacher was the only source of knowledge. The time has come when the skills of finding information and using different tools became the most important in teaching. So it’s time to make friends with corpuses, monolingual (eng-eng) dictionaries and search techniques.
That’s all for today. I hope these tips will help you work more effectively with new vocabulary and feel more confident using it. Or maybe you have your own life hacks? Share in the comments!
