May 19, 2011

#3 Big or Large? (revise)

Big
Large
Written (251)
Colloquial (537)
Written (430)
Colloquial (116)
Big adventure
That big ?
Large room
Large amounts of
Big affair
Big baby
Large bank
Large sums of
Big argument
Big drinker
Large scale
Large number of
Big business
Big fright
Large bay
Large factory
Big chance
Big man
Large car
Large family
Big idea
Big money
Large box
Large size


Have you ever find out that there are lots of words in English are translated into the same Chinese meaning?  What's the different for them in English?  And how to use them in the right word order?  Here is a useful tool that called " concordance"; you can use it to figure out those words with same meaning, such as big and large.
As you can see from the table, by the number of using, we can understand that the word "large" is more used in written word, in contrast, the word "big" is more likely to be used in spoken way.  By this system, English as a second language learners can roughly know the different use way of words.  In addition, from the system, users can understand the common collocation of the words.
I think that this system is good, but the problems are two: first, the interface and the words are too small to figure out, second, not like the BBC the corner of asking a question, it doesn't provide detailed information about the words.

1 comment:

  1. Right, for corpus tools, you need to generate the rules by yourself.

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