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Hello everyone,

Welcome to the first “word of the week”, though it may happen more often than just once a week.

Today’s word is bankrupt, normally used as a noun or as an adjective. We’ll also look at the general noun bankruptcy.
The meaning according to the Free Online Dictionary (a great resource) is:

Noun
-a debtor that, upon voluntary petition or one invoked by the debtor’s creditors, is judged legally insolvent. The debtor’s remaining property is then administered for the creditors or is distributed among them.

Adj.
a. Having been legally declared financially insolvent.
b. Financially ruined; impoverished.

What does all this mean? It means a person or company doesn’t have enough money to pay its debts (money it owes to people called “creditors”). So if you owe a bank lots of money but your job doesn’t pay you enough to give you the ability to pay the bank back (= you’re insolvent), you can declare yourself “bankrupt.” When you do this the court appoints a person to control your finances, selling much of your property and paying the people you owe money to. In the end you won’t have much, but your finances will be in order and your old creditors can no longer claim money from you. For practical advice on bankruptcies (and some reading practice) see this website.

After declaring “bankruptcy”, the general noun for this idea, it is more difficult to get bank loans or credit cards (financial institutions won’t trust you as much). However, many famous people have filed for bankruptcy (including Rembrandt, Mark Twain, Henry Ford, Walt Disney) and many have become successful afterwards. In America, the federal law regulating bankruptcy is divided into chapters, so you will often hear or read references to “Chapter 11″ or “Chapter 7.”

Ways to use it: sentences
He is bankrupt.
He is nearly bankrupt.
The company went bankrupt 10 years ago.
They will declare bankruptcy tomorrow.
She filed for bankruptcy.
She filed for Chapter 11.
There were many bankruptcies last month.

Ways to use it: collocations:
be bankrupt
become bankrupt
go bankrupt
declare someone bankrupt
almost bankrupt
nearly bankrupt
personal bankruptcy
face bankruptcy
be close to bankruptcy
be forced into bankruptcy
file for bankruptcy
be saved from bankruptcy
bankruptcy order
the threat of bankruptcy

Ok, that’s enough for bankrupt I think. If you have any questions, follow the links or comment here and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Kris

Hi all,

Today’s blog is simply about vocabulary… you can learn word after word with vocabulary books and games, but how commonly are those words used?
Well, we have a list provided to us by About.com’s ESL page.

They’ve managed to rank the top 1000 most commonly used words in English. Looks like the list was created by a guy named Jerry Jones. I don’t know how - maybe by using Google? Anyway, the most common word is… “the.” Well, I admit, that’s not much of a surprise, and not very exciting, but it gives you a chance to see the truly important everyday-use words.

To be sure, your vocabulary will need more than 1000 words for you to be fully fluent. However, many of the top 1000 words are the building blocks of English. To really test yourself, take some of the most common verbs and nouns and try to make collocations out of them. See what collocations are here.

Here’s an example of collocations for a common and important word in English: money
These are fairly set pairs of words - the trick is to find out which verbs and adjectives are used with which nouns.

Money - with verbs
spend money
save money
make money
earn money
lose money
exchange money
put money in the bank
deposit money in the bank
take money out of the bank
withdraw money from the bank

Money - with adjectives
fake money
extra money

Add to my list with your own!
Try some collocation quizes (some are very hard!)

In case you don’t know, collocations are EXTREMELY important for learning languages, at least the ones I’ve tried. They are particularly important for English… so first, let’s tell you what they are. The following definitions and examples have been taken (and modified) from The Free Dictionary by Farlex.

Collocation, collocate (noun)
- a language unit, linguistic unit - one of the natural units into which linguistic messages can be analyzed
Collocate (verb)
- the act of positioning two or more objects together

Knowledge of collocations is vital for the competent use of a language: a grammatically correct sentence will stand out as ‘weird’ if collocational preferences are violated. This makes collocation an interesting area for language teaching.

Some examples for collocates of ‘bank’ are: central, account, manager, merchant, money, deposits, lending.
It is easy to see how the meaning of ‘bank’ is partly expressed through the choice of collocates.

Ok, so basically stated, collocations are ‘language chunks’. They are usually two words, sometimes with prepositions, articles or pronouns between them, that form an idea. Collocations usually consist of verbs and nouns, or adjectives and nouns. In this way they form language pairs, that fit together naturally. So using the example above, you may say ‘central bank’, but you cannot say ‘middle bank’. The meaning is sometimes understandable and the grammar is fine, but it sounds awkward and unnatural. Collocations have developed over hundreds of years, so they can not always be guessed, they must be learned through example and experience.

Collocations are the building blocks (not words and not sentences) from which natural spoken English is made. I have far too many students who study thousands of words and understand their meanings, but have no idea about how to use them in sentences. Using collocations can improve your ‘active vocabulary’ and limit the number of awkward phrases or sentences that you say or write.

Oxford has an entire dictionary just for collocations, though most good dictionaries (the books, not the electronic ones) will give a couple in the sample sentences they provide.

This is the one most important piece of language learning advice I can give students and teachers: learn, practice and use collocations. I have never seen them used in any systematic way in any language learning book or online resource, and I’ve looked at and used many.

Try them out, see if you agree.