Anyone can tell me the importance of the phrasal verbs? I mean, I've been 3 years studying English and despite knowing a lots of phrasal verbs I never know where the limit is as there are thousands, so I become crazy becouse I never stop studying new ones (which have a similar meanings) like for example: come round, come over, drop by, look in, drop in (visit)
Is it really important to control all this things?.
How do you study phrasal verbs?
What I do is to try to memorize them by heart, I'll give you another example: when you find something by accident, you say I come across it, but you can also use bump into, run across etc.. I'm sometimes very bookish becouse I try to look up and study all Phrasal verbs in the diccionary which it is impossible, I don't know what the best way to study phrasal verbs is but what I'm sure is that having so many of them the more I study the less I think I know.
Phrasal Verbs are a very important part of English. You are right that you devote your attention to studying phrasal verbs.
You noticed that there are thousands of phrasal verbs in your dictionary of phrasal verbs, and then you started to learn from the dictionary. It is impossible to learn the whole dictionary, so you should give it up and find a different approach to phrasal verbs.
The problem is how to choose which verbs to learn.
Here are some tips:
(1)
Learn only those phrasal verbs which you encounter in the books that you read. (You must read books if you want to be good at phrasal verbs.)
(2)
Learn those phrasal verbs which are frequently used. Perhaps your dictionary can tell you which ones are the most frequently used.
(3)
Choose the phrasal verbs which are included in normal dictionaries, as opposed to phrasal-verbs-dictionaries. Normal dictionaries contain only the more important phrasal verbs. Phrasal-verbs-dictionaries contain many unimportant ones.
thank you very much, I think you are right I've just bought a phrasal verbs exercise book which comes with more than a thousand, I know I should only concentrate on the importants ones but sometimes I don't know what the importants ones are.
Any other way to classify the importants ones? becouse I don't like reading and in my diccionary comes too many. should I buy a worse diccionary used for this? thank you.
I don't know what the importants ones are.
For me, I frequently hear a few phrasal verbs during watching sitcoms or any fighting flicks.
Here are,
Hang on, hold on, cheers up, think over, think about, talk over, bring up
let in, let out, figure out, sort out, work out, go away, get lost, chip in,
go out, come up, come across, take off, blow up, freak out, work on.......!
I hope it will ' bail you out' !
You must study them first and foremost, because they are simply spoken by native speakers.
I know all of them except freak out (what does it mean?), however I maybe should not focus too much only on the phrasal verbs and try to understand the meaning of the sentence without paying much attention on phrasal verbs.
Miguel,
Consider changing your way of learning. Get in touch with real English (written and spoken) and learn those phrasal verbs which you encounter. Change your goal from "learning English phrasal verbs" to "being able to understand English".
That way, your problem will go away. If you can understand English, then you know enough phrasal verbs. If you can't understand English, then you should learn the phrasal verbs that you don't understand. Simple.
Also, learn the phrasal verbs in sentences, rather than memorizing definitions.
If you don't like reading, maybe you can try listening.
