Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0437: Memorize phrasal verbs in English

Episode Date: November 10, 2015

Palash asks about memorizing phrasal verbs in English. I present some mnemonic ideas for remembering such verbs without mixing them up. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 437. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Palash asked a question in an email for suggestions for learning phrasal verbs in English. Now, for those who don't know, particularly native English speakers, phrasal verbs are basically a phenomenon that many native English speakers don't realize are actually happening, but it doesn't occur so much in other languages. The way that this

works is we have a verb, but then you add a small word after it and it completely changes the meaning to essentially another verb. For example, each of the following verbs has a basic meaning. The verb look, the verb make, and the verb run. You may think that each of these verbs means just one thing, the action of looking, the action of making something, and the action of running. But the reason that these words are so frequent, if you look in an English frequency list, is not because we run so much or because we look at things so much, but actually because each of these verbs equates to other verbs as well when combined with other

words. For example, the word look, if you add the word up to it, means something completely different. Look up means to search for something or to, you know, to, well, to look up something. It means a different verb. If you look into something, what that means is research. Now note that when I say look into, that sounds much more informal than the word research, which sounds really formal, but most languages have one verb for research and they don't say anything equivalent to look into. They use a single verb. Or how about the verb look out?

I mean, the verb look out is equivalent to the verb beware. But again, beware sounds formal. Just be aware that any other language with this word, with this verb, would have a single verb for beware that's different from the verb for look. Now, these little words that we put after look, up, into, and out, we could put these little words on the ends of the other verbs that we looked at, make and run, and change their meanings as well. So when I i say make up that doesn't mean to make something it means to invent something it's a new verb the verb for invent or if i say make out that means to distinguish like if i wrote something or if you wrote something and i can't make out your

handwriting it doesn't have anything to do with the action of making it just means that i can't distinguish or i can't understand what it's saying. So different verb. And then with run, if we put into on the end of that verb, we have encounter. So to run into something is to encounter. Like I didn't run into him yesterday. I didn't come across him yesterday. I didn't encounter him yesterday. Or to run out, again, has nothing to do with the action of running. It just means that you don't have something anymore. It just means that the, let's say that the water ran out. Other languages have a verb for running out of something. They don't use the verb correr in Spanish, for example. Has nothing to do with running at all. But for some reason, we don't

have a verb equivalent of that particular idiom, that particular phrasal verb, to run out of something. Now, to answer the question, now that we've clarified that, Palash, what I would suggest that you do is take a list of phrasal verbs. You can look them up online. They're pretty common. And go ahead and make lists of the most common small words that happen after the verbs. So the ones that we went over just a little bit ago, like up, into, and out, are very common as parts of phrasal verbs. I would suggest associating each of these words with distinct locations around a room. So using the examples of up, into, and out,

you would associate up with the ceiling of the room, into with perhaps the fireplace of a room, and out as the window or whatever's out the window. And then to remember the phrasal verbs, to look up something, you would imagine that you look up at the ceiling and up there is a magnifying glass. So you store a magnifying glass on the ceiling in your imagination. And you can remember that to look something up means to search for it. To look into,

you would put something in the fireplace that has to do with research. Maybe put an encyclopedia in there, burning up. So looking into, and then looking out means beware. So you could put a wolf out the window. So now you have a room with the word look. And if you just associate the different small words you can put after that with the places around the room, look up means to search for something, look into means to search for something. Look into means to research something. And look out means to beware of something. Then you can do that with

these other verbs as well. Make up, make out. Run into, run out. So for example, run out, you could have out the window something is being poured out and the last bit of it runs out of whatever's being poured out. And then running into, you could imagine that two people run into each other in the fireplace. But anyway, that's how I would suggest doing it. Those are just my thoughts. I've honestly, personally, never had to learn phrasal verbs before or really put any action or thought into learning phrasal verbs because I'm a native English speaker and they've always occurred naturally to me. So with that in mind, I'd be interested to hear how this goes for you, Palash. And for everyone listening, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at

masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.