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Using Google to find expressions | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| chiara-sai Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3707 days ago 54 posts - 146 votes  Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, French Studies: German, Japanese | Message 1 of 6 14 November 2014 at 11:25am | IP Logged |
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I decided to upgrade my Anki deck to include more natural phrases and sentences rather than bare structures
such as ’to be afraid of something’, which are quite unnatural. My problem is that I’m worried about making mistakes, so I wonder if there’s a way of finding the most common sentence that uses a certain structure with Google (or any other search engine). For example, inputting the half‑sentence ’I am afraid of’ and obtaining a list of the most common instances of that phrase: ’I am afraid of spiders’, ’I am afraid of the dark’, ’I am afraid of my mother‑in‑law’… I know it’s possible to use wildcards, for instance one can type “I am * of spiders” and get a list of results that contain that phrase with any word in place of the asterisk, but they’re not ordered by frequency. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5865 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 2 of 6 14 November 2014 at 1:18pm | IP Logged |
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Yes. There is an excellent website that does exactly that, in many languages, with lots of
options. It calls itself Web as a Corpus. http://www.webcorp.org.uk/live/ 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4846 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 3 of 6 17 November 2014 at 2:35am | IP Logged |
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You could try Tatoeba.
EDIT: Just wanted to add that the Web as a Corpus website looks very nice! This is promising. Thank you. Edited by kujichagulia on 17 November 2014 at 2:39am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6124 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 4 of 6 17 November 2014 at 6:26am | IP Logged |
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Yeah, I do this. When I write something in Japanese, and I'm not sure, I google it on the web, and if nobody has said it, then I don't write that.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 6 17 November 2014 at 9:22am | IP Logged |
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There are cases where I simply have to use Google because my dictionaries aren't sufficient. That includes things like New Norwegian and Low German. Neither of these have status as an independent language in Google so I can't just limit a search to texts in a certain language. However I still see the relevant texts even if I limit the searches to Norwegian (in general) and German, if I add some strategically chosen words to exclude unwanted texts - like "korleis" på nynorsk and 'vun' op Platt - but even with this technique I can only check words and expressions I already know (or expect), I can't see whether there are other, more common ones in use.
Google is of course also useful when it comes to estimating frequencies, but the raw 'hit' counts are often invalid because the search can't be limited to the relevant examples. But even a 'polluted' list is valid: if the first couple of pages are brimming with the construction I want to investigate (excluding grammar pages and pages clearly written by nonnatives) then it is reasonable to expect that the item under scrutiny is a common one. And you may find examples which are so informative that it is worth copying them for later use. Edited by Iversen on 17 November 2014 at 9:29am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 6 of 6 17 November 2014 at 10:05am | IP Logged |
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WordReference is also a useful website for finding examples sentences. It is also helpful for finding out more about how a word is used and its multiple meanings. I've found it especially helpful for colloquialisms.
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