#4: Please comment on the corpus-based reference tools.

• How do you like these tools?
  They are really useful for us who are non-native speakers. These tools can help non-native speakers to use a word certainly. Especially lextutor had a more friendly interface for me. There are a clear corpus downlist and a option to find keyword(s) with associated word within 4 words to right/left/either side. The most sweet thing is the statistic in the end of the search. But lextutor without an alphabet sorted. Furthermore, Collocation retrieval system is very nice for non-native speakers. Sometimes there was no reasons to use a word that was connected with a specific word. With these tools, Non-native speakers can speak and write more fluently.


• What are their strength and weakness, in comparison with a dictionary?
  
Dictionary's :
strength
1. Organize a word's attributes, phrases and idioms.
2. Use a monolingual dictionary can make you more english thinking.

weakness
1. Sometimes words are in same meaning, It's puzzling to use correctly.

Concordancer's :
strength
1. There are lots of sentences of a word. Maybe you can find a similar sentence that you want.
weakness
1. Need to find the rules of a keyword by yourself.
2. Not easy to use for a tyro.



• What are the difficulties you encounter when you used these tools?
  At beginning in concordancer, I don't know how to classify types that keyword belongs to . I just confirm my words whether they are used like I think. It might be a vocabulary problem. However, It says "Skill comes from practice", I am doing better now.
  

"pull up to the bumper, and get out of the car"

is a part of a lyric, now we can use Google to find the whole lyric.

I use a double quotes around the phrase and put it into Google search engine, as following:

It's very easy and correct to find the lyric even song's name and artist.

• Artist: PINK


• Song: Get This Party Started


• Lyric:
  
  

Google is awesome!!~

#3-Q: Is there any rule governing the use of "big" and "large"?

A: Yes.
When you use a ditionary to find the define of "Big" and "Large", you may confuse about how diffirent they are, they both describes by each other.But, through searching corpora, you can know how to use them better.

"Big"

• is often used to describe the shape of an object.
  => big car, big house, big TV, etc.
• sometimes to emphasize the important of things
  => a big difference, the big challenges

"Large"

• is often used to describe the amount of objects.
  => large number of books, large quantity of documents, large sums of money, large classes, etc.
• usually used in standard things.
  => large coke, large fries