BBS Kirchdorf2015/16 Gregor Schrettle

BBS Kirchdorf2015/16
Gregor Schrettle

VOCABULARYWORKWITHGOOGLEPHRASESEARCH

This is a great way to

-improve your writing style and

-work on your vocabulary skills.[1]

If you practice and apply this technique properly, you will find it to be an extremely powerful tool for writing perfect English.

This is how you use Google phrase search to learn new vocabulary:

1. Highlight all the new words in the vocabulary unit you are working on.
2. Pick 15 words that you didn’t know before. Read and study the translations.
3. This is the most important step:Take the first word and try to think of a context in which you would expect to see this word in a sentence.

For example:

Unit 1 has the word “encounter” in it.

1. Read and study the translation: “Begegnung”.
2. Try to imagine a sentence that deals with an encounter.
   For example, an encounter will take place somewhere. So you could try the phrase "encounter took place".
   Another possible context: People might say after an encounter that it was very good and led to great results. They might use the word “fruitful” to describe that (like the German phrase “fruchtbare Zusammenarbeit” suggests, for instance). So you could try the phrase "very fruitful encounter".

1. Go to Google.com. Enter your phrase with quotation marks at the beginning and at the end.

!! ALWAYS use the English version of Google!!You will get much better results!

Depending on your browser, go to or to get to the English version. (You might still have to click “Use Google.com” in the bottom right corner.)

!! You have to write the quotation marks directly in Google, not in Word.

1. Look at and analyze the results.
2. How many results did Google find? Anything less than 1,000 results is usually not very common.
3. Where do the results come from?
   If most of your results come from an address that has .deor .at or .fror .it in it, the phrase might be a literal translation of a German or French or Italian phrase. It might be uncommon in English.

For instance:

-You see that “value” means “Wert.”

-You think: “Well … We often say ‘großen Wert auf etwas legen’ — so I’ll try ‘lay big value on.’”

-You search the phrase "lay big value on"on Google.

-You get 395 results.

• The first result is located atde/seiten/english_index.htm.
• The address of the third one is at/seiten_englisch/referenz_en.htm.
• The fourth one is at de/en/duisburg/hotel_mirage.html .

This is not English!

-So let’s try the same phrase, but without “big.”

-Getting better … The quality of the results has improved. Some of them are from English-speaking countries. But we only have 241 results—not enough.

Now we can try a fantastic trick:

-We take the phrase "we lay value on" and replace the word “lay” with a star, or asterisk (*). This is a wildcard—it can stand for any word or number of words!

So let’s search "we * value on"and see what happens.

-PLACE seems to be the word we need!

-Let’s try "we place value on"—Not bad at all. We get 162,000 results.But we might find an even better phrase.

-Let’s see what happens if we put an asterisk between “place” and “value.” Wow—we get 31,300,000 results!

If we look at the first two pages of results, we can see that "place a high value on"is apparently the phrase of choice for native speakers of English!!

By the way, it’s especially good to use documents that are located, for instance, at .co.uk, .gov, .edu, or .ac.uk, (although of course documents at .comaddresses can contain excellent language, too).

1. From the Google search results, copy a whole sentence that has your phrase in it. Paste it into your document.

For instance:

Robert Palmer’s untimely death in September 2003 ended what promised to be a very fruitful encounter.

1. Do this for the other 14 words that you selected.

BE PATIENT & HAVE FUN!

[1]Please note: This also works with Bing and other search engines. Personally, I have found working with Google to be somewhat more satisfying – but that is nothing but a personal preference.