Indiana

I love to include example sentences.

some context for the word.

So I also really focus on collocations.

Collocations is a word, I guess it's kind of a grammar term, but this means words that most frequently show up together.

And

So, for example, I guess in English, when you think of the word bath, like, I don't know, a bathtub, like when you're going to take a bath, that's one collocation, take a bath, or run a bath, right?

When you fill up the tub, run the bath, like that's a verb that very commonly goes with the noun bath.

So to just learn one single word is great.

But if you can learn it in a larger context, so like with common other words that go with it, that's even better.

So I try to maybe look up a collocations dictionary to get some of these more frequent usages for a term.

especially if it's a synonym with another word.

Like, okay, another digression here.

The other day, one of my English students was asking me about the difference between complex and complicated.

And

And my initial reaction is like, oh, it's like the same thing.

You know, they're synonyms.

But of course the answer is not so easy as that.

So if you look up like a collocations dictionary with each of these words, you begin to see situations where complex would be used, where complicated is not used.

So like a complex system of transportation or highways or something like public transport, you more often see the word complex with something like that.

Or in nutrition or science, complex carbohydrate, we can't just replace the word complex with complicated there, like it's a set expression.