Phrasal verbs

Phrasal verbs: how to learn them so you actually use them

A phrasal verb is a verb plus a particle, and the particle can change the meaning completely: give up means to quit, give in means to yield, give away means to hand something over or let a secret slip. You can't work out the meaning from the parts. A list of verbs and their meanings turns into twenty look-alike lines that blur together within a day, and in conversation you still reach for the familiar stop or leave.

A phrasal verb reaches your speech once you've taken it the whole way: worked out from an example when people actually say it, recalled it without a hint, written a sentence about your own life and seen where you went wrong. Then, a few days later, you come back to it. Here the verbs are grouped by base verb and particle, so get up, get over and get along are easy to compare side by side. Each one has a clear meaning, a common mistake and an exercise.

LetsWords has a ready-made phrasal verb set, and the practice goes further than this page. You see the meaning and examples, then recall the English verb from a hint and write your own sentence with it. The check shows where the particle is wrong or the phrase sounds unnatural, and suggests a better way to say it. Spaced repetition brings the verb back in later sessions. Start now, and phrases like look forward to will stop being lines on a list.