Look Up the Usage (English)
Target Audience: All Levels
How can we use English naturally? In the long term, we need to listen, read, speak and write extensively to learn to the language in an ideal manner. However, there are times when we want to search for an specific phrase. This article will explore how to conduct an exact search for a phrase using online search engines.
We will use the expression below and search if it is grammatically appropriate.
- *“Who gave it for you?”
We will look this up with the 'exact match' function on Google. This function only shows pages with the exact phrase. This is useful when you want to look up a phrase exactly as it is.
Enclose the sentence, who gave it for you, with quotation marks in Figure 1.
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| Figure 1 : A Screen for the Exact Match Results of the Sentence "Who gave it for you?" |
Only 5 results are displayed. If a general sentence such as this one yields only 5 match results, then it probably means that something is wrong.
Now, how about the phrase,”Who gave it to you?” Please see Figure 2.
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| Figure 2 : A Screen for the Exact Match Results of the Sentence "Who gave it to you?" |
T'he search yielded about 458,000 results. This means that the phrase is used common enough. Using search engines such as Google in this way will show you if an expression is used commonly on a phrasal level: in the same way it can be used to look up collocation.
Task: Search what you tried to say recently or said but do not know whether the expression is grammatically appropriate or not. If you add 意味 ("meaning") in Japanese, search results in Japanese-only will be displayed first. So make sure to at least have a rough idea of what you want to say. If it is too difficult to form an entire sentence, you can still search part of a phrase (only "gave it to" for example), and enclose the phrase in quotation marks.
Now we can search for natural English. It's okay to ask someone a question when they are available, but there are times when you cannot do so. Let's take control of our learning!
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