#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.