Corpora

Hi everyone again!

How are you doing?

In this entry we are going to compare to different tools: British National Corpus and Linguee. 

Both are online corpora where you can look for different words and expressions and get results. In both on them, you can find different texts using the expression you need, so it's really helpful when you need to check when to use that expression because you will be shown different contexts where to use it.

Let's go with the first one: British National Corpus

When you first go in, you see what the picture shows. I'm going to use the expression in a few days as an example, so I write it on the search engine and this is what it shows.

We have found the frequency of use of this expression. After this, we can go to see the contexts where this expression appears.

In this section, we see compiled all the examples fromt texts that the British National Corpus has found. If we want to read the fragment itself, we just need to go to Overview.

Now we can read the fragment and check how to use it. If you read some of them, we will get an idea.

It's time to go with the second one: Linguee.

Linguee is a basic tool planned for students. It's useful because you can search the meaning of an expression or of one word, and also it offers a comparison of two texts where that expression is being used: one in you native language and the other in English.

As can be seen, the first one is a professional tool whereas the second one is design to be easy for students. The level of concretion is bigger in the British Corpus than in Linguee, but the searching in Linguee is quicker than in the British Corpus.