Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[fussy]

Hi,

I used to search Google to know if some English phrases or sentences are commonly used or not. Just enter the text and see how many results match it. Does anyone have same experience? It's really great to me. But there's a problem: sometimes I don't know if the texts appearing in some documents in the Internet are standard English or not. But this improves deduction ability anyway

[Swim4life]

I do the same thing. It works well for most cases.

[redset]

The British National Corpus is another good resource: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
There are probably others out there too.