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There are various reasons of learning collocations. Firstly, your language
will be more natural and more easily understood. Secondly, you will have
alternative and richer ways of expressing yourself. Thirdly, it is easier for our
brains to remember and use language in chunks or blocks rather than as single
words.
Some of us are often confused by the use of terms “collocations”,
“compound”, “phrasal verbs” or “idioms”. Yet all terms describe particular words
with a distinctive meaning they differ from each other. It’s useful to know the
differences between them.
In contrast to collocations compounds are units of meaning formed with two
or more words. Sometimes the words are written separately, sometimes they have a
hyphen and sometimes they are written as one word. Usually the meaning of the
compound can be guessed by knowing the meaning of the individual words .Some
examples of compound are
car park, post office, narrow-minded, shoelaces,
teapot.
People begin to recognize and understand simple compound words, such as
airplane and
toothbrush, in first grade, then progress to more complex compound
words. It is not easy to separate collocations and compounds.
Although “Phrasal verbs” are formed from two or three words, their
distinctive feature is that they have a particular meaning. Phrasal verbs are words
that consist of a verb and a particle. Particle can be prepositions or adverbs like:
at,
