How do we recognize faces?
Not by analyzing them, certainly not. We don't make an Excel file of proportions, coloring, distances that we ponder over in our free time, trying to memorize the data.
Instead, we form a gestalt of the overall pattern without being conscious of how we do that.
Humans learn complex things-- faces, chess, dance, sports and so forth--using pattern recognition.
And language falls into this camp too.
When you break a language up into its basics to study them one by one, you destroy any relationship between its elements. You destroy the pattern.
So acquire language in large lumps.
There's this obsession to break knowledge into facts and rules. We're fascinated with getting down to its building blocks.
That has its place, I'll admit.
But to learn a language, certainly if you want to use it, deal with intact text.
Songs. Poems. Stories. Articles. Books. Movies. Comics.
And so a word is better than a bunch of letters. Words in groups as phrases or sentences include a sense of how they are put together. Paragraphs develop a sentence. And an entire chapter, story or book enable you to get into the language in the realest sense of all.
What is a chunk?
It's a chunk of language. That is, it's a group of words that is in itself useful to use in real life.
You learn it as a block of text. It cannot easily be broken down, and so it shouldn't be.
A chunk is a a collocation of words. It may be an idiom, a formulaic expression, an archaic form that remains in current use, an idiom, a saying or even a phrasal verb.
In short, chunks are canned language. Prefabricated elements.
They are fun to use. They make you look like an expert.
If you come across them on the road - kill them!
If you come across them in a book - scribble them down in the margin.
(See also i+1 sentences.)
