In terms of vocabulary, different learners focus on different things. Some learners focus on translating words directly from their native language. Other learners enjoy learning slang. Some learners even think that the more complicated a word is, the better it is!
Personally, I’m a big fan of phrasal verbs. Not only are they extremely common and useful, they’re also relatively easy to learn. There are thousands of them though, so you won’t be able to learn them all at once – sorry.
Basically, phrasal verbs are verbs that combine with adverbs or prepositions. Here’s a sentence with two phrasal verbs in it:
The monkey picked up the banana and put it in his mouth.
Different phrasal verbs have different rules. Some of them are flexible (like someone who has been doing yoga for a long time) and others are very inflexible (like me – I can’t touch my toes!).
The first phrasal verb in our example, picked up, is flexible. We can change the position of the banana (the object) and keep the same meaning:
The monkey picked the banana up and put it in his mouth.
But the second phrasal verb is very inflexible. The word it must stay exactly where it is. We can’t say:
The monkey picked the banana up and put in it his mouth.
Now the sentence says that the monkey put his mouth inside the banana. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?
Another interesting thing about phrasal verbs is that they not only extend the meaning of the verb, like in our monkey example, they can also change the verb’s meaning! For example, when I was growing up my mother used to say to me:
“Don’t forget to pick up your little brother after school.”
She said that to me every single day. I don’t know why – maybe she thought I had a bad memory. But I didn’t pick up my little brother in the same way the monkey picked up the banana, did I? I could have, but my little brother was fat from eating too many Mars Bars and he was too heavy for me to actually pick up.
If you’re interested in exploring phrasal verbs more, you could get a phrasal verbs dictionary, or check out websites like this one which specialise in phrasal verbs. If there’s a phrasal verb you’re having trouble with, leave a comment or email me and I’ll do my best to explain it.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:49 am
Your example alway talk about monkey.
Thanks a lot. (for that monkey)