Сполучуваність слів

The last thing to be learned

Collocation is what remains wrong when everything else is right. A learner with two thousand words used in the correct pairings sounds better than one with six thousand used freely, because a wrong pairing is noticed instantly and a small vocabulary is not.

Verb plus noun

Note that браць удзел and прымаць рашэнне use different verbs where a Russian speaker expects the same one for both. That single pair accounts for a great many errors.

Adjective plus noun

• моцны чай, моцны мароз, but дужы чалавек
• глыбокая павага, not вялікая
• шчырая падзяка, not моцная
• крутая гара, but стромкі бераг

Verb plus adverb

горача падтрымліваць, катэгарычна адмаўляцца, грунтоўна разабрацца, шчыра прызнацца. These intensifiers are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one produces a sentence that is understood and quietly marked.

Where collocations come from

Some are inherited, some are calqued from Polish, and a growing number are calqued from Russian and disliked by careful writers. Прымаць удзел is exactly this case: it is widely heard, it is a Russian pattern, and the Belarusian collocation is браць удзел.

How to learn them

Not from lists but from reading, and by recording pairs rather than words. When you meet a new noun, note the verb it came with; when you meet an adjective, note its noun. A vocabulary notebook of pairs is worth several of single words.