Posted by pakguru on October 6th, 2018 | 0 comments | collocation, countable uncountable, IELTS, speaking, upaya, usaha, vocabulary, writing
Public-private collaboration in policy making requires a lot of efforts.
For Indonesians, effort is a word that often requires effort! This post will help you with your translations of upaya and usaha!
In its plural form, efforts is a kind of synonym for ‘activities designed to tackle a particular problem’:
Notice that ‘efforts’ collocates with the verb ‘to make’ (NOT ‘to do’).
Notice also that plural countable efforts are often attributed to a person or a group and that the word efforts is often preceded by a possessive and often followed by to + V1:
If we use this knowledge to re-write our opening sentence, we might get:
When effort (countable) is singular, it is very often part of a phrase involving certain collocations:
in an effort to + V1
make an effort to + V1
make every effort to + V1
joint effort
When effort is uncountable, certain collocations work well:
In fact, our opening sentence works best with the uncountable effort:
As with any noun that has both countable and uncountable forms, a useful general rule to follow would be to use the uncountable form when you’re speaking generally, and the countable form when you want to be specific.
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