Phrasal Verbs

ELLs tend to have trouble learning phrasal verbs, but they're all over the place in English. Mixing up phrasal verbs is a good way of being outed as a non-native English speaker. (Not that that's inherently a bad thing.)

What? You don't know what phrasal verbs are? Okay, fair enough. A phrasal verb is pretty much just a verb + preposition/adverb that functions as one unit, like: dress up, look out, look up (a word), type up, switch on/off, check out, etc. The hardest phrasal verbs are the ones that have prepositions that don't mean what they usually mean.

Confused? You should be.

Think about the preposition "up." What does it mean? It's somewhat of a direction, right? Right. That's the easily accessible and even more easily translatable definition of "up."

Now, does "up" signify some sort of direction in the phrase "dress up"? In any way at all? No. No, it doesn't. If you're dressing up, you're putting on fancy clothes or something.

This is what makes these phrasal verbs hard for ELLs to learn.

The best thing to do would be to practice and memorize common phrasal to get a general feel for how and when they're used. Good thing we gotcha covered.