Collocations

２年半間日本語を学んでいますが、語彙を増やす間、どんな自然な言い方ずっと迷います。例えば、英語は「going into madness」より「descend into madness」のほうがもっと自然な言い回しです。同様に、「descend into shock」より「going into shock」（ここでいう「shock」とは循環性ショックという医学用語）のほうがもっと自然です。

最近、「閉じる」と「閉める」はどう違うことを調べっている間に、この回答を見つけた。回答内容の一部分：

Here are some preferred collocations. (from google results) 本を閉じる, 目を閉じる, つぼみを閉じる, 口を閉じる, 貝がふたを閉じる, 携帯電話を閉じる, 1000 年の歴史を閉じる

すぐに語学に何か欠けているものが分かりました。単語を一ずつ学んていたのは大変だと気付いました。むしろ、「連句」（または「慣用句」）を学んだらもっと流暢になったと思います。そのために、「Common Japanese Collocations: A Learner’s Guide to Frequent Word Pairings」という参考書を買いました。

I’ve been learning Japanese for about two and a half years now, and one thing I’ve struggled with as I sought to expand my vocabulary was how to use words in a natural way. In English for example, instead of “going into madness”, we usually say “descend into madness”. In the same way, we usually say “going into shock” instead of “descending into shock” (“shock” here refers to the medical usage of the term).

Recently, I came across this Quora answer while re-reading the differences between 「閉じる」and 「閉める」, and the last part of the answer floored me:

Here are some preferred collocations. (from google results) 本を閉じる, 目を閉じる, つぼみを閉じる, 口を閉じる, 貝がふたを閉じる, 携帯電話を閉じる, 1000 年の歴史を閉じる

Without even needing to look up the meaning of “collocation”, I knew at that moment what I had been missing in my language learning journey. I realized it had been an uphill effort to learn individual vocabulary entries. Instead, it would have been much more productive if I had approached vocabulary building by learning entire collocated phrases.

To that end, I bought a book called Common Japanese Collocations: A Learner’s Guide to Frequent Word Pairings by Kakuko Shoji to use as a reference.