How to use and learn phrasal verbs in English

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hi, and welcome to the 3 English Experts. I'm Birgit. I'm Dave. And I'm Rebecca. And welcome to this episode. 3 English Experts is your English podcast to help you speak better English and create a positive and happy mindset for your English learning journey. Hello everyone and welcome to a new episode of our podcast. And today we are going to talk about the issue of phrasal verbs. So everybody or a lot of learners have probably heard about this, have an idea what is that. A phrasal verb is a combination of at least two words, maybe sometimes even more, put together and then make up a new meaning. One word very often together with a preposition, then the meaning changes. For example, to pick up is a different meaning than to pick, etwas auswählen and abhochheben. But pick up is aufnehmen, hochheben. So that's a combination really. There are a lot of them and learners wonder how can they remember them. We have some tips. Rebecca will talk about a certain issue and Dave will bring up more examples. I will start with offering you two verbs that can be used in combination with some prepositions. For example, to put. Put is usually etwas hinlegen, abstellen, put it on the table. But then you can put something down to something. That's a phrasal verb issue, which means abspeichern unter, put it down to experience. That's a completely different meaning. Or you might call some office and they tell you, hang on, I will put you through. Durchstellen, I put you through to my co -worker, to my colleague. Of course, you can put things together. Yeah, that doesn't need a lot of explanation. Maybe that's obvious. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not so easy. Another one that might not be too natural for German native talkers is put up with. Can you stand etwas ertragen? Can you put up with a lot of noise when you sleep or do you need it completely quiet? Put something back, that's again easier, zurücklegen. I chose another one, take. Take, etwas nehmen, so that's the opposite of put, put and take. Take off, ausziehen, take your clothes off before you go to sleep. To take something up, so you start something. So maybe that's not known by everybody. Example, a hobby. You can take up learning English even or take up a new language. Yeah, thank you. Take something in is to etwas aufnehmen, etwas Neues lernen. Maybe how much can you take in when you learn at one session? That would be a phrasal verb here. Or take somebody out. Take me out for a meal, Rebecca. Yeah, maybe I get a chance at some time to take you out for a coffee. When we finally meet. Yeah, we're listening to you describing them there. Oh, it's so difficult, isn't it? Phrasal verbs are a nightmare. I will honestly just say that right now. They are so because there's just so many of them. And yeah, they go with a really simple verb like put or take. But then as soon as you add on these and you had the one to put up with. So you've got two words. You've got the up and the with. So it's even more tricky. And I think sometimes the position of them, sometimes you have the noun or something between the preposition and the verb, which is also quite not so easy. I was thinking take off. You were talking about take off like your jacket. But of course, take off is also an aeroplane take off. Yeah, of course. Or you can say the sales price or the sales have taken off, like as in they've increased dramatically. And it just shows there's so many different ways of describing them or just different meanings, which is quite confusing. It is. Yeah. Is it the same in German? You've got a lot of Aus and Auf and. Well, we have this division of the verb, don't we? Where there's Aufnehmen and Abnehmen, but that feels for us, I think, more like one verb and not this combination. I don't really know whether there's a comparison in our language, but I recommend. So if you want to look into the subject, of course, hopefully our podcast episode will help you to get some ideas and you can find a lot of material. So if you look for phrasal verb with take, you will get online on the Internet or with later. David will talk about chat GPT lists. So maybe take it in parts every week, every month, a list of phrasal verbs and you can add to your vocabulary. Yeah, absolutely. I just wanted to bring up, I think I'm not sure about American, I really don't know, but I know in British English we overuse or we use a lot of phrasal verbs. And I think this is really difficult for non-English speakers. So, for example, if I ask most German English learners, do you know the word hire? We hired a new salesperson. They were like, yeah, to hire. Do you know take on? We took on a new salesperson. Maybe not so much. What does that really mean? To take on means to hire, einstellen. But and often the Brits would choose the phrasal verb over the sort of normal verb. Same with fire. So we let him go. We fired him. Basically, everyone knows fire. We fired him. Everybody would understand that. I think most non-natives would understand, English learners would understand fire, but they don't necessarily understand. We let him go. Let him go where? We let him go to the bathroom. Where did we let him go? It just doesn't really make sense unless you know that. And I think my advice, I think would be if you're a non-native and you're communicating in English with other non-natives. So if you're German, you write it to an Italian guy and you're both communicating in English. I wouldn't necessarily go with the phrasal verbs all the time. Use the word hire. Use the word fire. Use the normal verb. We had to put off a meeting, like to postpone, for example. Postpone, they might know. Put off? Maybe not so much. So that would be my advice is if you're communicating with a Brit and it's maybe easier and they will use them with you, probably. So it is good to know them. It is good to learn them. But I think inter non-native communication in English is going back to this. Keep it simple. Don't overcomplicate with trying to be fancy. Yeah. Birgit, do you agree with that? I think that's a very good tip you're bringing in here, because Germans, that's just proving what we feel as native Germans. There's so many choices, so many words. And we feel we can never know them all. And a lot of people want to know them all. We want to know it 100%. Yeah, exactly. But hearing this from you as a Brit is a good idea. And it's so nice to hear there's always another choice. And of course, it's not worse or one is better or the other is worse. It's a good idea. Thank you. Yeah. And I think there's just... I know that from German. I mean, we're saying we're not sure if it's exactly the same, but I get confused sometimes with my an, or my auf, or my ab, or my aus, nemen, abnemen, you know what I mean? It's just one little word, one little part of the word. It's easy to mix it up. So it's a good thing to learn. I think at an advanced level, you have to get into phrasal verbs. You really can't avoid them. At sort of intermediate level, there's a lot of standard ones, like to get up in the morning. I get up, I sit down or I pick up my kids from school, things like that. Obviously, later on, there are some good books of business phrasal verbs. I think Dave's going to talk a bit more like business phrasal verbs that can be quite useful to use. You could probably find them on Amazon. I have a couple of those. And again, like Birgit said, learn them in groups. Just choose right. I'm going to ones with get or with put or with take or something. But not easy. Dave, how is ChatGBT going to help us? Yeah, I mean, I just want to say what you said is also I agree totally. I mean, it's really very confusing. And maybe when you're working with the non -natives, it's better to keep it simple and use the normal English verbs instead of using the phrasal verbs. Often in my experience, for example, when I do sort of presentation trainings in a situation where maybe an native is giving the presentations, I often hear them use typically native phrases, whether they're idioms or even in this case, phrasal verbs. And I see then some of the non -native participants sort of scratching their head, wondering what exactly something means. And so I really often call these phrasal verbs sort of a secret language of the natives. And in order to understand it better, you have to learn them. But to come to the ChatGPT, you mentioned books. But of course, if you have a iChatGPT, you can do that as well. And that's what I did. I just tested it out. I asked ChatGPT to create a list of the top 50 most common ones, which it did. So I got a list of the top 50. What I then did is I wanted to make me a little table. So I print it out and I've got my list for myself. So I asked it to make a table with the phrasal verb in one column, an English explanation in the second column, in the third column, an example sentence, and in the final column, a German translation, which it also did. And I expected that because I've worked with it before. But what I didn't know and what I learned today was actually the fact that if you wanted to, you could have that printed out as a Word document. So you just have to literally ask ChatGPT to create a Word document with the grid lines and everything, and it will do that for you to download. So absolutely amazing. I'm impressed. It's impressive. And within seconds as incredible. Anyway, actually, guys, you've already mentioned most of the phrasal verbs I wanted to mention. Oh, sorry. No worries. I mean, the main one was the bring up and you've mentioned it before. So that was a business thing that you often hear in meetings, for example. Thanks for bringing that topic up. So mentioning something. Rebecca mentioned the one with the put off. So to postpone. Right. You often get that maybe in emails from a native speaker saying, oh, the meeting's being put off, for example. Or the other one, which I could also say here, maybe is the call off. So instead of saying cancelled, people often say call off. And so the meeting has been called off. If you don't understand called off, what does it mean exactly? OK, so that's another example of a phrasal verb. Yeah. So very tricky bit by bit. And if you're having conversations with natives, just try and oh, what could that be? Can you work it out? And worst case scenario, just ask, what did you mean by call off? Yeah, I think there is this sort of discussion about global English. What is global English? And someone said to me once, perhaps we should just teach the natives how to communicate better with the non-natives. I do agree with that. Because natives just wouldn't realise what they're doing. They don't realise that the language they're using is over complicated for a non-native, so they just speak louder and slower than non -natives. That doesn't always help. So I think just telling them don't use a phrasal verb, but they would probably say, what the hell is a phrasal verb? Explaining, use to mention instead of bringing it up. Thanks for mentioning that. They're more likely to know that than bringing it up. So I think there is this sort of argument for when you're communicating with non-natives in English, they speak in your language. Help them out. Be nice and simplify your language. Not in a dumb way. You don't have to dumb it down. But you can just, there are little things that you can do, I think, to make communication easier. Birgit, would you agree with that? Yeah, that's so interesting. I think that's really good for listeners to realise you're saying that, that maybe natives have a different way of talking and that's maybe not the easiest way. I strongly believe that we or a lot of learners feel like the fanciness, you said that, a fancy talk. They really love that. And that's what they want. OK, yeah, yeah. There's an urge, a natural urge of sounding really British or American. And maybe that goes into it. It's the correct use of all grammar tenses when you are able to use whatever you need. And also on top of not the easy language. So I agree with you that that would help. But I also know a lot of learners are really after. OK, they want the fancy stuff. Yeah, definitely. I think they do. Yeah. But to some extent, maybe I'm a fan of everything in moderation. Maybe you can find a middle ground, middle way. Except that maybe it's impossible to know them all because the English language has so many options and phrasal verbs. OK. OK, so this was our episode on phrasal verbs. We like to break it down into bits and pieces. Everybody, people can take in easily. And next time we're going to talk about CV and interview training. We will have a little focus on what Rebecca does very often with her clients. She does a lot of CV interview training for people who are looking for a new job and obviously need to talk English. So this will be our subject of our next episode. Hopefully you will tune in and press play and listen to us. Bye for now. Thanks for listening. Thank you. Bye for now. Bye. Thank you so much for pressing play today. If you have any comments, questions or perhaps suggestions for future episodes, feel free to contact us at our website 3EnglishExperts.com. Have a great day and see you next time.