Collocations are groups of words that appear in a language more frequently than random chance would explain.
There are certain ways of saying things in any language that a learner simply wouldn’t be able to guess without knowing. Directly translating collocations from your own language is a common source of unnatural speech.
For instance, literally saying “take a bath” in Japanese (風呂をとる) will sound obviously unnatural to a Japanese person. You need to use 風呂に入る (literally, enter the bath).
So lets share and talk about them, because studying them is often more useful than studying vocabulary alone. This also includes any associated particles that may or may not jive with the English translation’s sense of motion or transitivity.
Here are some more examples
電話に出る - でんわにでる - to answer the phone (beginners might guess 電話に答える)
試合に勝つ・負ける - しあいにかつ・まける - to win/lose a match (beginners might not realize these verbs are intransitive, thus guessing 試合を勝つ)
Do you think that, when choosing which verb to use, the Japanese tend to place more emphasis on the beginning of an action?
as in お風呂に入る
or バスに乗る
(this is an off-the-cuff hypothesis that my husband is coming up with right now)
My theory to explain unintuitive collocations is that Japanese and English have different sets of “all-purpose” verbs that get used when a more precise verb sounds too formal or pretentious.
English frequently uses have, get, take, etc.
Whereas Japanese frequently uses verbs like する、出る、つける, etc.
Actually, I have to remember collocations for English too. It would be nice to have a great list of Japanese collocations, and put all of these on flashcards, like Anki or Memrise.
The せいby itself means fault? I couldn’t find it in any dictionary yet. Also I’ve only heard and never read this collocation, so I don’t know if it’s even spelled like this.
