About phrasal verbs

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1

Hello everybody,

I have great difficulty learning phrasal verbs and let me know how you take it to store, to memorize all these verbs or most common.

Do you have any advice, tips or whatever. I wish I could live without it, and use the corresponding verb but it seems that in the current language, phrasal verbs are used very often.

Thank you,

2

Yes, the phrasal verbs, or the multi-part verbs, are the most difficult topic in the English Grammar.
Two points are especially complicated:

  1. They often have too many meanings
  2. The meanings of the same phrasal verbs can be quite different in differfent areas of English: in the UK, in the US, in Australia etc.
    My recommendation is - don’t try to learn all phrasal verbs, it’s impossible. Learn only such phrasal verbs and only such meanings of these verbs that you meet in the text or hear in the conversations many times.
    For example “look for”. It means "search’, but the most native speakers use ‘to look for’, not ‘to search’ (at least in the conversation)
    The phrasal verbs that you meet rarely you can ignore up to a quite high level of the language acquiring.
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3

I cannot come up with any ideas. I cannot put up with the excessive dependence of the English language on phrasal verbs.

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4

I would treat each phrasal verb as a new verb to learn. Google to find lists of phrasal verbs on the Internet. Here is an example. An Extensive List of Phrasal Verbs | Common Phrasal Verbs
Then import the list into LingQ and go through it as a lesson, saving phrasal verbs, highlighting and creating a LingQ for each one. You may even want to tag some of them and group them for later review.
Creating LingQs of them will ensure that these phrasal verbs will appear highlighted in subsequent lessons. If you keep seeing them, and think of them as just new verbs that have to be learned, without worrying too much about their component parts, you will eventually get used to them.
In importing a list there may be formatting issues. If some words are squished together you may have to just “ignore” these or hit “X” on your keyboard. Good luck.

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5

Heh. I have a similar issue with the dependence of Japanese on auxiliary verbs. :wink:

6

Wow. It’s a long list:)

7

Actually, it’s even longer. I have a book about phrasal verbs. This book has 600 pages with a lot of examples.
But as I said before: nobody needs to learn them all!..
Learn only the most popular that you can find many times in the books or in the conversations with native speakers.

8

Evgueny, can I have a name of this book? 600 pages it sounds amazingly.

9

I don’t think that it is so necessary for you. Maybe it can be useful sometimes for teachers. But if you would like to know:
English-Russian dictionary of Verbal Collocations, edited by E. Mednikova, 668 pages, 1044 phrasal verbs with a lot of examples, Moscow 1990
I think the more useful can be for you:
The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English by A.S.Hornby, E.V. Gatenby, H. Wakefield, in 3 books, Oxford, different years of the edition.
It consists not only the verbs, but there are a lot of phrasal verbs as well.

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10

Thank you very much:)

11

Thank you all for your responses and to Steve for this useful link.