English in 5 minutes! We speak about what phrasal verbs are, why you need them, and which ones to learn! Book an Italki lesson with us: Rachel: https://teach.italki.com/teacher/1394345 Paul: https://www.italki.com/teacher/1657616 The construction of a phrasal verb is of two parts, a verb and either a preposition or adverb, known as a particle. Some example verbs could be ‘get’, ‘take’, ‘look’, or ‘put’ and some examples of prepositions or adverbs are ‘up’, ‘on’, ‘over’, ‘in’ and ‘away’. The unique thing about phrasal verbs is that by adding the particle the usual significance of the verb alone changes. For example, ‘to put’ - you can put something somewhere, but ‘put off’ - means to postpone or delay something. Bob was asked to put off his team meeting until after lunch. Some phrasal verbs are known as ‘separable’ and some are ‘inseparable’. What does this mean? Well, it means that you can sometimes separate the verb and the particle and put parts of the information, the object, between these two words, and other times you cannot do that as the verb and the particle are always found together as no object is needed. Let's look at a new example. ‘Get in’ - this means to enter or to arrive. Your boss might ask you, ‘what time did you get in this morning?’ This is inseparable. You can’t say ‘what time did you get this morning in’ – it doesn’t make sense! Another example is to ‘break down’. You can reply to the boss with ‘I got in late because my car broke down.’ To ‘break down’ means to stop working usually due to a problem or a mechanical fault. Now, let’s look at a separable phrasal verb. They need an object. We can use ‘turn down’ – this means to refuse, or say no, to something or someone. Here’s the example, ‘They turned our offer down’ – the object is ‘the offer’, or it could be ‘they turned us down’ with an object pronoun. You can’t just say ‘they turned down’, because we don’t know what!