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Guide

How to learn phrasal verbs without memorising lists

"Put up with", "carry out", "come across". Three ordinary verbs, three ordinary particles, and none of the meanings are guessable from the parts. This is why phrasal verbs defeat learners who have otherwise excellent English.

Why lists fail

A list of two hundred phrasal verbs with one-line meanings is the standard resource and almost nobody finishes one. The meanings blur together because there is nothing to distinguish "bring up" from "bring about" from "bring on" except a definition, and definitions of near-identical strings are exactly what memory is worst at holding.

What works instead

1. Learn them from sentences, not from the list

Every phrasal verb you meet in real reading arrives with the thing that makes it memorable: a situation. "The meeting was called off because of the storm" teaches "call off" in a way the definition "to cancel" never will. Save the sentence. On iPhone this is two taps.

2. Group by particle, not by verb

Textbooks group by verb: all the "get" phrasal verbs together. That maximises confusion. The particle carries more meaning than people expect: up often means completion or increase (use up, speed up, wrap up), out often means thoroughly or to the end (figure out, sort out, wear out), off often means separation or cancellation (call off, put off, set off). Learning the tendencies of six or seven particles gives you a guess for hundreds of verbs you have never seen.

3. Notice separable ones

"Pick it up" is fine; "pick up it" is not. Whether the object can go between the verb and the particle is something your ear learns from examples, not from a rule. This is another argument for sentences.

4. Review on a schedule

Phrasal verbs decay fast because they look so much like each other. They need spaced repetition more than any other kind of vocabulary. Three minutes a day, a day after you meet one, then three days, then a week.

A hundred to start from

If you want a running start rather than waiting to meet them, the WordVale Phrasal Verbs collection has a hundred of the most useful, each with a clear meaning and its own page. Read through them once, save the ones you did not know, and let the reviews do the rest.

A few that trip up almost everyone: put up with, come across, bring about, carry out, call off.

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