Collocation? or Structure?

As a non-native speaker of English, it has been my goal to figure out the best approach to master speaking/writing/reading/listening skills in English. Different people have different ways in relation with learning a second language based on their personality, interests, motivation, or background knowledge. For this reason, it seems waste of time to discuss which way is best or not. Nevertheless, it'd be worthwhile to think about the benefit coming from learning collocation and different structures in English, for most of Korean publishers seem to be big fans of learning collocations while there might be ignorance of teaching how to form basic English structures that are totally different from Korean language.

Back in Korea, the books I ran into at bookstores were mostly about collocations or expressions. I love those books in that collocations make my English more understandable and native-like. Furthermore, using collocations saves my time and efforts that otherwise I should spend more to make my sentences understood by putting more words. Due to the benefits that collocations bring to our English, there are big defaults dealing with collocations. First of all, we should know the roles of collocations are restricted to parts of speech that have limited functions within whole sentence structures. What more necessary seems to get sense how to put those parts of speech quickly and automatically in a sentence. Second of all, most Korean English learners fall short of finding chances to use collocation they memorize. since Korean language does not furnish us with something like collocation in English,

Culture?

I'd have been through a generation that takes humbleness as an ideal attitude in class. What I mean by humbleness is we are supposed to listen to teachers, take notes, and go home to study hard on our own without questioning to teachers. Our goal in class is to find a short-cut to the answers that we are asked to write on tests. As a consequence, there were hardly raising-hands during class in an effort to get engaged in class activities that encourage us to think in our own ways. Speaking of giving credits for bringing up some ideas in class, we don't care what we are thinking of the contents, what we care is either what the answers are, or what our professors think of. In other words, I have been trained only in pursuit of getting right answers, neither my thoughts nor peers'. Since I am so used to this more or less passive way of learning, it was so painful for me to have to come up with my thoughts in class. In most cases, I am assigned to a group activity that requires me to say something. However, I end up remaining, most of time, in silence rather than contributing my ideas to my group. I am not good at returning so quickly with ideas as soon as a question is presented in class. More individual/private time is necessarily needed for me to be confident with ideas. In addition, there might be a different perspective toward talking attitude in class between in Korea and in the U.S. We do not like talking much in class because of the judgment that talking much is considered to be big talkers or windbags. We are, therefore, prudent with bringing in ideas to class, which might seem awkward or indifferent to the American professors.