English Collocations: Learn 144 Word Pairs Native Speakers Actually Use

Collocations are the word pairs English speakers glue together by habit: you make a mistake but do homework, you get heavy rain but strong coffee. No grammar rule predicts them, which is exactly why flashcards work. The English Collocations deck (code SJ5349, 144 cards) gives each pair with its meaning and the wrong version learners typically produce.

What the cards look like

The pairs you'll lock in

Make/do/take/have (decision, progress, effort, break, chance, conversation); adjective pairs (strong coffee, deep sleep, bright future, light meal, soft drink); daily routine (fall asleep, stay up late, get dressed, put on weight); a whole way family (lose your way, give way, by the way, on the way, come a long way, go a long way); money and business (earn a living, run a business, set up a business, run a risk); problems and goals (tackle a problem, overcome an obstacle, set/meet/miss/extend a deadline, pursue a goal); tasks (carry out, take on, delegate); conflict and tension (settle a dispute, escalate a conflict, ease tension); stress and pressure (relieve stress, withstand pressure, exert pressure).

Study it by verb, then by noun

The deck is built in two halves. Cards 1-66 are the classic learner traps, where the mistake is usually a translation from your own language (take a decision, lose the bus, win weight). From card 80 onward it switches to noun families: one noun, many verbs. Situation gets ten cards (handle, deal with, cope with, manage, assess, analyze, evaluate, monitor, improve, worsen), stress gets ten more. Their backs are almost identical ("to manage circumstances", "to handle pressure"), so flipping them blind turns into guesswork.

Tip: for those clusters, quiz yourself from the noun. Cover the verb and ask "what can I do to a situation?" until you can list all ten, then write one sentence per verb. Recall by family beats ten near-identical cards.

Read the "not ..." notes with care

The wrong alternatives are the deck's best feature, but a few overreach:

• Card 49 says "hold an opinion (not 'have an opinion' is also correct)": have an opinion is perfectly standard.
• Cards 89 and 138 reject resolve a problem and resist pressure. Both are fine; the deck pairs are just more common.
• Card 114 flags analyse as an error. It's simply British spelling.
• Card 123 has it backwards: the usual idiom is defuse tension (remove the fuse). Diffuse tension exists but is the less common form. Rewrite the front.
• Card 1 marks take a decision as wrong "in American English": it's normal in British English.

Treat the "not" as "less natural", not "never", and you won't drop a valid British phrase in an exam.

Practise next

Collocations shade into phrasal verbs and idioms. Once these feel automatic, move on to the English Phrasal Verbs article.

Search for SJ5349 in the library on Flip It and run the deck in two passes: cards 1-79 first, then the noun families.