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Compare And Contrast The Comparison Of Collocations And Idioms In German

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In this essay, I will compare and contrast how collocations and idioms can be learned from a book and from a corpus. I decided to carry out this study because, even though German is my advanced language, I often find it difficult to make my speech more natural and fluent. In order to sound more natural when I am speaking German, I need to have some knowledge of typical German sayings, idioms and collocations. Another reason why I decided to focus on idioms and collocations in German was that they vary greatly to the ones we use in English and I wanted to gain some knowledge on these subjects.
Corpus linguistics can be best defined as a linguistic methodology which is founded on the use of electronic collections of naturally occurring texts. …show more content…

(Sinclair, 29) What Sinclair is referring to as word combinations are idioms, expressions and of course, collocations. The phraseological nature of language has long been perceived as “language does not expect us to build everything starting with lumber, nails, and blueprint, and rather it provides us with an incredibly large number of prefabs” (Bolinger 1976:1)
The major task for second language collocation research is to discover what it means for learners of German (or any other second language), how they learn it and what problems they encounter when acquiring a collocation. Collocation not only plays a crucial role in language production and language comprehension but also functions as a key indicator of the language learners’ overall proficiency in the field of second language accusation. (Men, 2016)
Knowledge of collocations, to most people, is the of the same importance as the knowledge of grammar. If one is aware of simple language patterns in their second language not only will their flow of speech be much better, but they will be also more confident when listening to and speaking, their chosen

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