grammar from just that word in the phrase, that “s” on the end, hates. And in
the future, whenever you say John hates ice cream or he hates ice cream, you
will automatically add the “s” because that’s how you learned it. You won’t
have to spend time trying to remember the conjugations of the verb “hate”
because you learned it correctly from a phrase and now it’s automatic.
Of course, you don’t actually have to think about all of this consciously.
Just by learning the phrase, you will automatically learn the correct verb
conjugation. You eliminate the extra step of labeling and analyzing grammar
terms. That’s why learning phrases leads to faster speech and faster
understanding.
On the other hand, if you learn all of this from a textbook, you’ll often just
learn the root of the word “to hate” and you’ll focus on this form: hate, hate,
hate. So you study it and you memorize it. That’s when you start making
mistakes, because you memorized it mostly in this way, without other words.
Later, you try to remember all of the conjugations of the verb. But because
you didn’t learn this with other words, sometimes you might say “he hate ice
cream.” You’ll forget the “s” because you never learned it correctly in a
sentence, in a phrase. And in a real conversation there is no time to think
about verb conjugations.
Learning phrases will also help your pronunciation. One of the biggest
problems I see with English learners is they speak with strange rhythm and
intonation. Rhythm and intonation are the “music” of English. While many
students worry about the pronunciation of individual sounds such as v, b, r,
and l, their biggest problem is unnatural rhythm.
The rhythm of English is created by the natural pattern of pauses. Native
speakers naturally pause between phrases. They speak the language in
phrases, in short chunks of English. Because they learned English mostly
from phrases, their pronunciation is clear and easy to understand. On the
other hand, many students learn English by memorizing individual words,
and when they speak, they speak word by word, one at a time. As a result,
they often pause in strange places. They create unnatural word groupings.
This creates a very strange and unnatural rhythm that many native speakers
