How to Use the Word Pages

A dictionary built for speaking

Words & Collocations is the section you'll come back to most. It has a page for each of the words people use most in spoken English, and each page answers the question a normal dictionary skips: which words does this one go with?

That question matters more than it looks. You can know what "decision" means and still say "do a decision", which every listener will notice. The meaning was never the problem. The partner word was. English speakers "make" decisions, "take" a break, "have" an idea, "pay" attention. Those pairings are called collocations, and they're what makes English sound natural or strange.

What's on a word page

Every page starts with the word, its part of speech and a short, plain definition. Then come groups of collocations, sorted by the kind of partner: the verbs that go with the word, the adjectives that describe it, the prepositions that follow it, and the fixed phrases it lives in. A page might show you "have the ability", "a natural ability", "the ability to" and "to the best of my ability".

Each collocation comes with one example sentence, and every sentence has audio. Some items also show small chips with other words that fit the same slot, like "develop, build, improve". At the bottom there's a short drill: a sentence with a gap, where you fill in the missing partner and then say the whole sentence out loud.

There are also frequency lists that group the words by type: the core speaking words, word families, nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns and prepositions. They're the map. The word pages are the places on it.

How to study one page

Read the definition, then close your eyes and say what the word means in your own English. If you can't, read it again.

Play every example sentence and repeat it. Don't read them silently. The point is to get the pair into your mouth, not your notes.

Choose two collocations to keep. Not all of them. Pick the two you can imagine saying this week. Write each one in a sentence about your own life. "We finally made a decision on the new apartment" is worth ten sentences about somebody else.

Do the drill out loud. Say the full sentence, not the missing word. The missing word alone teaches you nothing about how it sounds in company.

Using word pages with other lessons

The word pages work best as a side trip. When a lesson uses a word you half-know, open its page and spend two minutes there. You'll often find that the lesson's phrase is one of the listed collocations, and seeing it with its neighbors makes it stick.

They also help when you're writing. Before you send an email at work, check the one word you're least sure about. Is it "strong coffee" or "powerful coffee"? The word page will tell you, and you'll remember it better because you needed it.

How many pages a day

Two or three is plenty. A word page takes four or five minutes if you say everything out loud, and that's the only way it works. Twenty pages read in a hurry will be gone by the weekend. Three pages spoken, with two collocations kept from each, gives you six new pairs you'll actually use. Over a month, that's well over a hundred.

Come back to old pages, too. Once a week, open the pages you studied last week, cover the examples, and try to say one sentence for each collocation you kept. The ones you can't say are the ones to review.