Aww yeah, today we are talking about one of the most frustrating parts of
learning English and that is phrasal verbs.
So learners from all over the
world find phrasal verbs really confusing and difficult to learn and remember.
And there are several reasons why it can be so frustrating to learn phrasal verbs.
Tthe first one is that there are so many of them if you type
phrasal verbs into Google you will come up with dozens of lists teaching you 100
or 200 or 500 of the most important phrasal verbs so even if we wanted to,
we could not possibly teach you all of these in one single video but that's why
in this video we want to give you some of the tools that you need to be able to
learn these on your own when you encounter them.
Second, phrasal verbs are really common in informal English
and this is really important because I see
that English learners all the times overuse alternatives that are way too
formal in everyday speech so these are not only important to be able to
understand native conversations but also for you to sound more natural in your speaking.
As you probably know there are many videos on YouTube teaching about
phrasal verbs but I find that most of these make it way too complex explaining
all of the little details about the grammar of phrasal verbs which probably
leaves you feeling even more confused than when you started out so while I'm
not saying that grammar is not important I want you to focus on learning phrasal
verbs like a native would and most natives don't even know about any of
these grammar rules they don't know what transitive or intransitive is they don't
know what a particle is, some of them might not even know what a verb is or
whether you can put a pronoun in the middle and separate the particle from
the verb or if it comes after.
So if this sounds like gibberish to you that's okay
it's not so important for you to know all these little details and we're going
to look a little bit at how you can learn phrasal verbs more intuitively.
So for all of these reasons we created this lesson to give you a method to be able
to learn as many phrasal verbs as you want and we will be giving you eight
different examples to kind of show you this and by the way if you want to
actually be able to use these phrasal verbs in your speech it's really
important that you not forget them so I highly recommend using a spaced
repetition system tool like Memrise or Anki which will help you to learn
scientifically and never forget them and remember to always learn collocations so
this means that you don't just look for a list of phrasal verbs and try to
memorize all them, this means that you actually take them from the context just
like we're going to do in this video today using some of your favorite TV
series and this way you will sound much more natural when you use them because
you'll be learning in a natural way whether you should be using a phrasal
verb with an object or not whether it's okay to separate the particle and the
verb and so on.
And finally if you stick around until the end we are going to
also be looking at the tricky pronunciation of phrasal verbs so that
you can sound more natural when you speak them and so that you can recognize
them easily in your favorite media and finally at the end we will have a fun
quiz prepared so you can test your knowledge!
By the way before we get into
the rest of the lesson I want to let you know that if you're new here every week
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All right, so we will start out with a little bit of simple grammar so the first part
of learning about phrasal verbs is being able to identify them, right?
So a phrasal verb consists of as it sounds like a verb plus a particle now a particle is
either a preposition or an adverb and when these two parts of speech come
together they can actually create an entirely new meaning so to illustrate
this let's take a look at how this happens with the verb come when we
change a couple different prepositions so we have "come at" which means to
attack "come by" meaning to briefly visit someone and "come across" mean to find a
piece of information by chance.
So as you can see the meaning
of these changes completely there really is no easy logic that can help you to
understand what it means by just looking at the words that it's comprised of.
So my first piece of advice for you is to not learn too many of these at once like
I said you can find lots of lists of phrasal verbs but this is not
necessarily so useful in being able to use them naturally because you probably
will easily forget them or you will not be using them correctly.
It is much more effective to think about creating goals for example that you want to learn one
new phrasal verb per day or that you want to learn three new phrasal verbs
each week and that you're actually proactive about learning these and then
creating some sentences to play around with them second I recommend that you
don't try to think of phrasal verbs by the words that compose them if you're
trying to remember which verb plus which preposition or adverb creates which
different meaning you're just going to be lost and confused so instead what you
should do is each time you encounter a phrasal verb think of it as a completely
new expression and it's also very recommendable that you learn these
through context just like we're going to do in today's lesson.
My third piece of advice which will be very useful beyond just learning phrasal verbs is to
immerse yourself in the English language as much as you possibly can,
read books in English, watch series, watch the news, do anything that you love doing in your
own language in English and spend as much time doing this per day as possible
and really play with it, don't get really scared or intimidated when you find a
new phrasal verb first see if you can understand it through the context and
maybe you won't always be able to do this but then you can actually look it
up on Google or in a dictionary and try to guess which of the different meanings
that it has is the one that you're looking for and then actually write it
down take notes and add the phrasal verb to your Anki or your Memrise or any
other app that you're using to remember these, create sentences with them and
actually use them in your speaking if you don't have anyone to speak with then
record yourself and listen back and give yourself feedback so to get you started
we have selected eight of the most important and most useful phrasal verbs
that we don't think you'll know yet and we will be learning them the most fun
way with some favorite TV series.
So, let's get into it!
So you need to be careful because
sometimes a phrasal verb can have more than one particle as is the case with this one.
So if someone invents an idea or a plan we would say that that person
CAME UP WITH that idea or plan.
So as we saw this one has both up and with in order to create that meaning.
Let's look at some more examples!
The next phrasal verb we are going to look at is
is BREAK OUT, do you know when we use this one?
So phrasal verbs get even
more complicated because sometimes they can have more than one meaning as is the
case with this one.
So let's take a look at an example with the first meaning
which is for something to suddenly start like a fire or a war.
And the second meaning of BREAK OUT means to escape
for example, from prison.
Next, another very common phrasal verb is GIVE UP.
Let's watch some examples and try to get the meaning through context.
You might have seen that people use this phrasal verb to
admit defeat or in other words to surrender or to stop trying something.
Let's see another example would GIVE UP.
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The next phrasal verb on our list is HANG OUT.
and this one is extremely common, natives use it all the time
when they want to say that they're spending a lot of time in a place or with someone.
All right, let's continue with another really
common one: RUN OUT.
Like we did before we'll take a look at some examples and I
want you to try to guess what the meaning is from the context.
So, based on these examples when would you use RUN OUT?
All right so so far we have learned five of the phrasal verbs and we're going to
learn three more but I just wanted to take a quick interruption to remind you
that while it is really important that you can identify these and understand
them that is also crucial that you actually use them so even if you don't
have anyone to speak to right now I want you to try actually taking note of these
creating some example sentences, even recording yourself and thinking about
how you would use these speaking with someone you could even just try this
when you're stuck in traffic in your car on your way to work as one of my students did.
All right now let's continue with the last three phrasal verbs
The next one is SCREW UP.
Now SCREW UP can mean to make a serious mistake or to spoil something.
Now if you've recently moved to a new city or neighborhood you'll find the
next phrasal verb really useful.
It means that you become comfortable in a new
environment and you start to feel confident in it,
Do you know which of these three I'm talking about?
So SETTLE DOWN means that you become comfortable in a new environment,
it can also be used for example to say that you want to get married and settled down
that means that you're kind of doing things that are putting roots down in a
place like having kids or adopting a dog, buying a house so for example I have
settled down here in Barcelona.
Let's look at some other examples with TV series.
Now SETTLE DOWN is another phrasal verb that has more than one meaning.
Do you know which of these phrasal verbs it can have the same meaning as?
In fact we have many ways to express the same meaning all three of these phrasal verbs
can be used to tell someone to relax especially when they are reacting
in an exaggerated manner.
Okay last but not least is LOOK UP.
Now we use this one when we want to
search for some information.
For example, you would LOOK UP
the meaning of a certain word in English.
All right we have just a little bit more to go in the
lesson as promised we're going to teach you about pronunciation with phrasal verbs.
Now as we've explained earlier in this lesson phrasal verbs consist of a
verb and a particle now verbs are content words, natives stress them and
particles are function words this means that they are unstressed and by the way
if you are unfamiliar with content and function words they are extremely
important if you want to sound natural speaking English and if you want to
understand natives no matter how fast we speak so if you don't know about those I
highly recommend you check out this lesson after you finish this video.
Now one thing that can make your speech sound really unnatural is when you over
stress function words like the particles in phrasal verbs alright so I'm sure
this all sounds a little bit confusing but when we look at some examples it
will become much clearer so let's look at COME UP, now which of these do you think
should be stressed? So COME the verb should be stressed; UP that the particle
should be de-stressed and furthermore when this happens we actually connect them
most the times
Now of course this
is one of the reasons that it can seem like natives speak so fast but when you
know how to identify it it suddenly becomes much easier to understand fast speaking natives.
Let's look at some other ones like SCREW UP which becomes
[SCROO-wup]
and LOOK UP which becomes [LOO-kup]
Now let's practice this a little bit
more with some of the clips that we've already watched but this time instead of
focusing just on the meaning I also want you to focus on the pronunciation.
Awesome job today guys!
But we're not quite done yet now we have a fun quiz prepared to test your knowledge
Let's get into it!