Now, of course, a phrase is a group of words. It’s a group of words that naturally go together. This is very important. You see, when you only study individual words, you are doing a number of things that make learning difficult. Number one, when you study just an individual word like a vocabulary, something in a vocabulary list, or even in your notebook you write one single word and then you write the meaning or the translation, here’s the problem. That word has no connections to anything else. Therefore, it’s difficult for your brain to remember it.
That’s why you have to keep repeating again and again. You look at that list and you try to memorize it. And then the next day you forget and then you go back and you try to memorize it again and again and again and again and again. And maybe after a very long time you might remember it. But most likely you’re going to forget it, especially long-term. And yet that’s the way most students are learning English and studying vocabulary.
Here’s another problem with just learning single words. When you study just single words, you’re not learning any grammar. But when you study phrases, you are actually learning grammar. It’s kind of an effortless, easy way to learn grammar. You don’t need to think about rules. You don’t need to think about anything. And yet, you will be learning correct grammar when you study groups of words instead of phrases.
Let me give you an example of this. Let’s just, y’know, take any phrase…like, um, a simple, simple sentence. He was a bad dog. He was a bad dog. Now, let’s imagine that you’re a new English student and the word bad is new for you. Of course, I know you know it, but let’s just imagine you go way back to the very beginning and your first year of learning English and bad is a new word. Now the normal way of studying that, you would write it down, bad, it would be in a little, y’know, a list. And then you would studybad means not good, bad means not good.
You’d probably translate it to your own language. And then after lots and lots and lots of time, maybe you would remember it.
Well using our system, you do something very different. You would write down that whole phrase. He was a bad dog. That’s actually a full sentence. Or you could just write down was a bad dog or he was a bad dog, whatever.And then every single time you study or review, you would always, always, always study the full complete phrase. You would never just study that word, bad. You would study the whole thing. Now by doing that you’re getting free grammar. How do you know? Well, because first of all you’re getting that verb, was, right? Was, and that’s just going to stick in your brain, he was, he was, he was.
You’re also learning articles. You don’t need to remember what that means. You don’t have to even worry about it. And yet you know that it’s correct to say, in this situation, a bad dog. He was a bad dog. Some people say a, he was a bad dog. Both pronunciations are correct. So he was a bad dog. He was a bad dog. A lot of students have problems. When do I use a, or a? When do I not? When do I use the? And you’re trying to memorize all these super complicated rules and situations for it. Forget that. It’s too complicated. You’ll never remember it. Just study phrases and you’ll start to feel when to use it, when it’s correct, when it sounds correct and when it sounds strange, when it’s not correct to use those things.
And, of course, this is true for all grammar; all phrases; all vocabulary. By studying a full phrase or even a full sentence, always, always, always, you’re going to get lots of grammar. You’re going to learn which vocabulary words go together naturally. And you’re going to know when to use them in which situations. Because sometimes, for example, there might be a situation where there are many words that mean the same thing. And yet we typically use one of them.
Like, we might say he was a bad dog. That’s a common phrase, a bad dog, bad dog. We use that word bad to describe a dog who’s naughty, who’s not good. But we don’t usually say horrendous. Now horrendous means super super bad, really terrible. And yet we don’t usually say he was a horrendous dog. It sounds strange, even though the meaning is basically correct. Yet, in normal real English, not textbooks, but real English, we just don’t use that word to describe dogs, not usually. I don’t know why.
There’s no real rule about it. It’s just that’s what we usually do. And every language has these kind of word combinations that are more common, and other word combinations which just aren’t used typically. How do you learn that? Well you can’t learn it from any rules because there are no rules about that. You have to learn it by studying phrases always. Always, always, always study phrases. Review phrases.
Whenever you learn a new word don’t just write down that individual word. Write down the full phrase, or even better, the full sentence that it’s in. Always