Introducing Phrasal Verbs

Phrasal verbs are often used to take the place verbs in their classical form but the student does not need to use them if he is uncomfortable. For older people who are at a disadvantage on a learning curve compared to their younger associates because learning takes time, straight forward English is just as good but today everybody wants to talk like they do in movies. One of the largest influences is film because the dialogue is natural and often enough trendy. Here are some tips in learning how to deal with these verb forms.

1. Don’t memorize them without understanding how they can substitute for the classical form or unless you are already familiar with them
2. Try to apply them to your speech. Often enough the learner fails to grasp their use because he is also self-conscious or lazy to try them out in public and get a reply.
3. Look for feedback from people. Ask them what they think and be pro-active. People are not born teachers and even if they were they are not there to correct your every mistake and tell you how to speak.
4. Remember there is a figurative sense and literal sense for these verbs and try to make some connection between the two. One example would “take off” which is said when a cover or object has to be removed from a surface. That is its literal or real sense. The figurative one which has nothing to do with removing an cover or item from a surface can refer to a plane that leaves the runway and ascends into the air.
5. Some phrasal verbs are expressed with objects in the middle and others are not. So we “pick up” the mail at the post office and we “pick the mail up” and we say “Our flight took off at noon” and not “Our flight took at noon off”.
6. Phrasal verbs change in meaning depending on the preposition that is used after the verb and the student can learn them based on what the preposition means. This is not always easy but it is a big help. Learning the phrasal verb “get up” is made easier when the student sees that up refers to something that is elevated and in fact, getting up means “rising” out of bed. So it is easier then for the student to grasp a question regarding his sleep pattern by associating the “rising” to the question, “What time do you get out of bed?”
7. Associating phrasal verbs to objects also helps in the learning process especially if the person is visually oriented. So when you go to the airport immediately the learner can recall that the planes are either “taking off” or landing.
8. The student should become familiar with other verb tenses besides the present so that the phrasal verb can stick in his memory better. In the above example, I used the present continuous and gerunds are often used with prepositions to create a phrasal verb.
9. The student might like to see how phrasal verbs get incorporated into expressions, which are another way of saying something that is indirect or not as literal as when classical English is spoken. The expression is often just the phrasal verb and an object or object phrase beginning with a preposition like “they are in it for the money” where the prepositional phrase begins with “in” and to be in would just be the phrasal verb and the object money can be substituted for words like “ride” or “something”.