Effortless English: Learn To Speak English Like a native

Where to Find Phrases
So where does a student get these phrases? How do you know which ones to learn?
The good news is that you can find them everywhere. Any natural English content
contains a wealth of phrases. In a future chapter, I will tell you specifically where to
get useful English phrases. But for now, focus on getting phrases from whatever
English you are listening to or reading.
To do this you need to start keeping a “phrase” notebook. Every time you see or
hear a new word or phrase, write that phrase in your notebook. When you find new
English vocabulary in a lesson, in something you are listening to, in a book, or in
an article, write down the phrase. Not just one word, write down the entire phrase,
and then review that phrase again and again each day. By doing this, you will create
a notebook full of phrases and sentences you can use, not just individual words.
You’ll be programming yourself to speak in phrases instead of word by word.
If you’re watching a movie about a bank robbery, for example, you might hear a
character say, 
“They’re getting away!” 
You know 
get 
means “to obtain” something,
and you’re pretty sure 
away
refers to “being at a distance” – like far away. But it’s
confusing. So you write it down, 
“They are getting away.”
Then when you look it up
in an idiomatic dictionary, you learn that one meaning of “to get away” is to escape.
You might also discover that sometimes when people are going on vacation, they
say they are 
“getting away.”
Even if you had previously memorized the words 
get

---

and 
away
on some vocabulary list, you still might not understand what the character
in the movie is saying. But since you wrote down the phrase, you now know a new
expression you can use in many different situations.
Here’s another example. Let’s say someone describes their former pet by saying,
“
He was a bad dog.”
It’s a fairly simple phrase, but you write it down in your
notebook. Every time you review, you study that complete phrase. By doing that,
you are getting free grammar – 
he was
. You know this is something that was true in
the past, not 
he is
, which would mean the dog still was around. You’re also getting
some free tips about word usage. We don’t usually say he was a 
horrendous
dog, for
example, even though the meaning is correct. In normal spoken English, we don’t
usually use that word to describe a dog. This is not what you would learn from
studying the definition of horrendous. You learn it by studying a phrase.
When you write down a phrase, write where it came from. If you saw this in a
newspaper article about the economy, put that down because that is going to trigger
your memory. It will remind you of how the word was used and in what context.
You’ll start to learn when certain phrases and words are used and when they are not.
This way, you’ll begin to get a feeling about what is correct and how to put
sentences together.