Why do we still learn words instead of phrases?

 I've been learning Dutch for 2 years and the single biggest shift in my progress was when I stopped looking up individual words and started learning phrases as whole units.

"Ik heb er zin in" doesn't mean anything if you translate each word. But as a chunk, it just means "I'm looking forward to it." Same with things like Spanish "no me da la gana" or German "es kommt darauf an."

The problem is that most tools are built around single-word lookup. Dictionaries, flashcard apps, even Google Translate — they all assume the unit of language is a word. But the unit of fluency is a phrase.

What changed for me was watching YouTube videos with target language subtitles and forcing myself to save full phrases with context instead of individual vocab. It's slower at first but the payoff is huge, you start hearing the chunks in real conversation.

Anyone else make this shift? How do you capture and review phrases vs. words?