I used to have a good instinct, when talking with my students, for the bumps in their sentences. I knew immediately whether an unusual word or phrase was imaginative and exciting, or confusing, or plain wrong. Every word vibrated, and I felt them all. My finger, it seemed, was on the pulse of the language. Or maybe it was that the language pulsed through me, like blood. English was, after all, my mother tongue.
Besides unpredictable spelling, a ton of irregular verbs, and the innumerable phrasal verbs to get a handle on, my students must master the natural but not so obvious pairings of particular words. Collocations, they are called. Every language has them, but in your own language, it doesn’t seem you are doing anything special when you mention your mother tongue, not your mother language. You may think you have simply united two ordinary words, but linguists say otherwise: Collocations are habitual word pairings, favored by native speakers, who use them instinctively. Until students too can use collocations, their English might be correct, but it will not sound natural.
So how does a student learn these collocations? There are no grammatical rules to guide you, only your ear. “It doesn’t sound right,” I might say to the student who describes last week’s wind as a heavy wind.
“Is it wrong?”
“No, not exactly. But we just wouldn’t say that.”
Nobody pushes me to explain why, though a few students over the years have shown frustration instead of stoically accepting the slow route of accumulating exposure. They want the fast route of memorizing rules. But there is no fast track to English proficiency.
I feel bad anyway for having no better explanation. I mean, saying, You just have to know seems like shutting a door in their faces. Fumble around, I’m essentially saying, until you become enlightened. And good luck with that.
One day in one of my classes, however, I realized that I had a way to ease my burden, and she was sitting right in front of me. It was Silvia, pale and quiet, with long wavy dark hair and a round face, pretty without the least show of effort or exuberance. She was the youngest of the three students and had an infallible ear. She, I thought, could be my alternative authority. So when her classmate says strong rain, I turn to Silvia. “Is that how you would say it?”
Silvia makes a face to express her discomfort and shakes her head slowly, regretfully. I prompt her. “What would you say instead?”
“Maybe heavy rain?” she suggests in her tentative way. I smile in triumph.
In my 12 years of teaching at this academy, I have met no one with better instincts. As her English develops—not getting better, just wider and deeper—and my English grows a little sluggish, I find I sometimes turn to her not to substitute for me but to inform me when I am in doubt. If Silvia would say it, it’s okay. If she gives me an alternative, her word is the better one. I trust her ear even more than my own.
The only student to rival her, from several years before Silvia appeared, was also named Silvia. What is it about the name, I wondered. “Who was that terrific student?” someone might ask. “You must mean Silvia,” I’ll be able to say with total confidence. And some longing. The Seekers, in their 1964 hit “I’ll Never Find Another You,” sang of knowing the impossibility of ever finding a replacement for the beloved. “I’ll never find another you,” sings Judith Durham, and I could have told the first Silvia the same thing. To my surprise, I did find another Silvia—Silvia 2. What are the chances of finding yet another Silvia?
In the 1972 hit “Sylvia’s Mother,” by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, the mother of a girl named Sylvia intercepts a call from a boyfriend desperate to speak to the girl he loves. But Silvia is on a different path now, headed into a new life, marrying a new fellow. “Don’t say something to make her start crying again,” the mother warns. No need for the warning, really, because the mother doesn’t let them talk. So it goes—find your Silvia and then lose your Silvia. Happens all the time. But I still want to know—how often do you have the luck to find two Silvias? Where did they come from? Must be the mothers. Silvia’s mothers. Practically a collocation.
