1. Assignment 4:

1. Assignment 4: Please comment on the corpus-based reference tools, (i.e., concordancers and collocation retrieval systems). How do you like these tools? What are their strength and weakness, in comparison with a dictionary? What are the difficulties you encounter when you used these tools?

I like the corpus-based reference tools more than dictionary,but I think they are a little difference between themselves;corpus-based reference tools can check the use of collocation is it often to use or it's use rarely ,and you can easily know how to use that word correctly,and maybe you can also know the latest or popular usage to that word,but
on the other hand,if you don't know the any meaning of the word,then corpus-based reference tools maybe useless for you,then you need a dictionary.And the advantage of the dictionary is that you can easily what the word you find it means,but corpus-based reference tools can't do that kind of good job like dictionary does.