Getting Started
Used frequently by native speakers, phrasal verbs are incredibly commonplace in the English language and appear everywhere from TV to text messages, from movies to magazines, and from dramas to documentaries, to name but a few!
Reading a newspaper headline? No doubt you’ll come across phrasal verbs when trying to catch up with what’s been going on around the world or how your favourite team is doing in the sport.
Watching your favourite show? You’ll undoubtedly have heard countless phrasal verbs in all types of TV programmes, such as the one below. Even just a few seconds from Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares contains as many as three – go up against something, cut somebody down and rip something apart.
Having a conversation with an English speaker? Phrasal verbs are used in everyday life to put across ideas, feelings, news, plans and much more. In fact, just by looking at the conversation below you can see as many as 10! Can you can spot them all?
Phrasal verbs present a challenge for you as a learner in terms of their meaning, form and pronunciation, and if these challenges aren’t overcome, you’ll struggle to become a fully competent C1 learner. However, the good news is that by the end of this lesson you’ll be far more confident in using and understanding a wide range of them.
On a very basic level, phrasal verbs operate as a single lexical item in that they’re made up of two or more words that function as a single unit of meaning. While some phrasal verbs are used and understood in a very literal sense, many others can challenge learners. This is due to the fact that they take on a more figurative meaning, since the meaning of the verb and the particle(s) combined is often completely different in meaning from the two parts taken separately. No wonder they’re so difficult to learn!
As you can see, we’ve already come upon at least a dozen on this page alone having only just started! So before we go on, let’s see what you already know below.
Did you manage to find all 10 phrasal verbs from the Whatsapp conversation? Go ahead and see how you did below…