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“Hi, I’m Yuki, and I’m a victim of phrasal verbs.”
“Hi, Yuki.”
The ESL support group settled in.
“It started with ‘pick up.’ Simple. Lift something. Then I learned ‘pick out’ — choose. ‘Pick on’ — bully. ‘Pick at’ — eat slowly. ‘Pick off’ — remove or shoot. ‘Pick over’ — examine. ‘Pick through’ — search.”
A man in the back nodded empathetically.
“Then I learned ‘turn.’ Turn on, turn off, turn up, turn down, turn in, turn out, turn over, turn around, turn against, turn away, turn back, turn into. Thirteen phrasal verbs from one root. None of them involve actual rotation.”
The group murmured.
“‘Make up’ can mean invent, reconcile, apply cosmetics, or compensate. ‘Put out’ can mean extinguish, inconvenience, publish, or produce. ‘Get’ plus any preposition in existence means a different thing. Get up, get down, get on, get off, get over, get through, get around, get by, get at, get to, get with—”
“We know,” said the group, in unison.
“I looked up how many phrasal verbs English has.”
“Don’t,” someone warned.
“Over ten thousand.”
The room fell silent.
“And each one has an average of three to five distinct meanings,” Yuki continued. “So a learner needs to memorize roughly forty thousand combinations. Just for this one feature.”
The group leader stood up. “New rule. No counting phrasal verbs after 9 PM.”
Everyone nodded. It was a good rule. Unlike English.
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