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Make creates a result, do describes the work. That one line settles most collocation questions.
Use make when a result comes into existence: make a decision, make an offer, make progress. Use do for work and activities: do business, do research, do the paperwork. German often says "machen" for both — English splits result from activity.
Updated: July 2026
A2 · Idioms & Collocations · 10 min
A structured ten-slide lesson for A2 learners. Hear both verbs in context, meet the result-or-activity rule from a tutor, then practise the key business collocations across six interactive drills before a final five-question quiz. The whole arc is under ten minutes and nothing requires a signup.
German routes an enormous range of actions through one verb, machen — homework, business, progress and mistakes all take it, with tun covering much of the rest. English forces a choice between two verbs at exactly those points, and the border does not sit where a German speaker's instinct expects it. The typical result is a default to make, because it sounds like machen — producing sentences like "make my homework" or "make research". Learners who notice the problem and then overcorrect land on the reverse classic: "do a decision" or "do a mistake". Native speakers register both errors instantly, even when the rest of the sentence is flawless. The good news is that make and do are not distributed at random; a clear tendency runs underneath them. Make creates a result that exists after the action. Do describes the work or activity itself. Internalise that one distinction and most collocations fall into place on their own — the small remainder you learn as fixed phrases, exactly as you once learned fixed phrases in your own language.
The test for make is simple: after the action, does something exist that was not there before? After "make a decision", a decision exists. After "make an offer", an offer is on the table. After "make an appointment", a meeting sits in the calendar. The same logic carries "make a phone call" — the call is an event you bring into being — plus "make a suggestion", "make a mistake" and "make money". Money may be the clearest case of all: it is a result your work produces. "Make progress" follows too — progress is something you can point to at the end of the quarter. In working life these are the phrases you reach for constantly: "We made them an offer last week." "The team has made real progress." "Can I make a suggestion?" Store each collocation as a single unit, verb and noun together. Not "decision" on its own, but "make a decision" as one chunk. That way your memory retrieves the right verb automatically, at speaking speed, instead of translating from German and gambling on the outcome.
Do points at the activity itself, not its product. "Do business" describes the ongoing commercial relationship, "do research" the work of researching, "do the paperwork" the grind of working through the forms. Add "do your job", "do your best" and the fixed phrase "do someone a favour". Notice how often do pairs with work in the broadest sense — tasks, duties, routines. That is why English also says "do your homework" and "do the shopping". A second clue: do is the all-purpose English verb for unspecified activity. "What are you doing?" asks about some activity without naming one. So whenever you talk about an activity without naming a concrete result, do is almost always the right pick. In the office it sounds like this: "I'm doing the paperwork for the new contract." "She's doing research on the market." "We've done business with them for years." Look closely at that last sentence: it describes no single transaction but an activity stretched over years — a textbook do context, and one of the most useful business collocations in this lesson.
Like every good tendency, this one has exceptions — and the right move is to learn them as fixed phrases without hunting for logic. The most famous is "make the bed": nothing new comes into existence when you tidy a bed, yet English insists on make. In the other direction, English says "do the dishes" for the washing-up and "do your hair", even though you could argue something visible results. These pairs grew by habit and are simply convention now. One case worth knowing at work is "deal": here both verbs circulate. "Make a deal" is the usual American choice; "do a deal" is also heard, particularly in British English. Either way you will be understood. The practical advice: treat exceptions not as a threat to the rule but as a short memory list. There are few of them — a dozen phrases cover nearly everything you will meet in daily life. The result-versus-activity tendency stays your default tool; the memory list catches the remainder. That division of labour is exactly how proficient speakers manage collocations, and it scales to every new phrase you meet later.
Four errors keep surfacing in German speakers' business English, and the result question defuses all four. First: "do a decision" — wrong, because the decision is a result. Correct is "make a decision". Second, the opposite direction: "make research" — wrong, because research is work. Correct is "do research". Third: "make business with", a direct translation of the German "Geschäfte machen mit". English says "do business with" — one of the most valuable corrections available to you, because the phrase appears constantly in emails and negotiations. Fourth: "make my homework" and "make my job" instead of "do my homework" and "do my job". A strategy that works: open your own English emails from the past few weeks and highlight every make and do. Test each one against the question: result or activity? The exercise takes ten minutes and almost always exposes precisely the collocations you personally confuse. Then store the corrected phrases as units — verb plus noun together — and the error fades surprisingly fast, because you are no longer translating word by word from German under time pressure.
Finally, a look at the situations where the choice comes up most often: meetings and business emails. Meetings are make territory, because meetings exist to produce results: "make a point", "make a suggestion", "make a proposal", "make time for something", and at the end, with luck, "make a decision". The preparation and follow-up belong to do: "do the preparation", "do the research before the call", "do the paperwork afterwards". In email you meet both constantly: "Thank you for the offer you made us." "We look forward to doing business with you." "Could you do me a favour and forward this?" When you are unsure, anchor on the noun rather than guessing the verb — retrieve the whole learned unit. And if nothing comes, fall back on the tendency; it beats a coin flip by a wide margin. A result you can name takes make; an activity takes do. With that rule of thumb plus the short exceptions list, you are solidly equipped for office life — and every new collocation you meet from now on has a place to land.
Use make when a result exists after the action: "make a decision" (the decision now exists), "make an offer" (the offer is on the table), "make progress", "make money". Use do for work and activities: "do business", "do research", "do your job", "do the paperwork". It is a tendency with a few exceptions, not an exceptionless law — but it covers the large majority of cases.
Because a decision is a result: after the action, something exists that was not there before — and results take make. The fixed collocation is "make a decision". The error often comes from overcorrection: learners who have discovered that not everything is make retreat to do to be safe. Store the phrase as one unit — "make a decision" — and the question stops arising altogether.
This is where habit beats logic. Making a bed creates no new result, yet English insists on "make the bed"; washing up is clearly work, yet it takes "do the dishes". Pairs like these are convention and cannot be derived from the rule. The good news: there are only a few. Learn them as fixed phrases, like vocabulary items, and rely on the result-or-activity tendency for everything else.
Both exist. "Make a deal" is the usual choice in American English; "do a deal" is also heard, particularly in British English. You will be understood with either, anywhere. If you want to settle on one form, "make a deal" is a safe default — it fits the result logic of make and is widespread in international business English.
Make and do are among the first collocations worth learning deliberately at A2, because they appear in almost every conversation. Before this lesson you should be comfortable with the *present-simple* (A2), since every example here builds on it. Afterwards, *starting-conversations* (A2) pairs well — you will use do and make directly in small talk — and the natural next step is *formal-email-opening-closing* (A2), where the business collocations from this lesson land in real emails.
Strictly speaking German also has two — "machen" and "tun" — but the border between them runs completely differently from the one between make and do, which is why translation does not help. Many other languages face the same issue: French covers both English verbs with "faire", Spanish with "hacer". That is why learners from very different language families struggle with the same distinction. In English, the division of labour between the two verbs has settled into fixed collocations — exactly the phrases you learn as units in this lesson.
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