Brush up means to refresh your knowledge or improve a skill you once had but have partly forgotten: a language from school, driving after a long break, maths before an exam. The condition is strict: brush up is only used about something you have already learned. You can't say it about learning from scratch.
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brush up + language/skill; brush up on + language/skill/subject
- Before my trip to Italy, I'm brushing up on the Italian I learned at university.
- She took a short online course to brush up her Excel skills before the interview.
What changed
First versionI need to pull up my English before the job interview.
RevisionI need to brush up my English before the job interview.
Pull up can look like the right phrase for improving something, but pull up is what a car does when it arrives and stops. It has nothing to do with knowledge. To improve your rusty English, the phrase is brush up, so it replaced pull up.
Brush up works with or without on: brush up your French and brush up on your French mean the same thing. If you just want to say “get better”, without the idea of refreshing something forgotten, use improve: I want to improve my French.
Your turn
I've never studied Chinese before, so this year I'm going to ___ it from scratch.
Show the answer
learn — The speaker has never studied Chinese and will start from scratch: learn. Brush up means to refresh something you already knew, and here there's nothing to refresh.
Write about a skill you once had and now want to refresh. Say why you need it and how you'll improve it.
I learned German at school, and now I want to brush up on it before my business trip to Munich, so I'll watch German news every evening.
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