Phrasal Verbs | English Language: Grammar
"Bring it on! Come in! Keep it up!" Phrasal verbs are a very important part of English. In this video we teach you how to use them properly when using pronouns.
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TRANSCRIPT:Hey what’s up, guys? My name is Joel and I’m a teacher here at SOLEX in the beautiful city of Chicago, and today I want to talk to you about a specific problem with grammar that is known as “phrasal verbs”. Now phrasal verbs are something very common in English that you probably already know something about. A phrasal verb is a verb that is made up of two words: first a normal verb like “turn” and a preposition like “up”. When you add these two words together, it changes the meaning. So for example, “turn up” means “to make louder”. You turn up the volume on your stereo or your TV or something like that, or your phone. Now here I have it in the past tense, so I put the “ed” after the first word. This does not change when it’s in the past tense. So it’s pretty easy to use if you think about it like that. “We turned up the music.” Now one thing I want to do, is I want to find the subject, the verb, and, what we call the “direct object”, and I’ll explain that in a little bit. So first we have the subject, which is We. We have the verb that has two parts: turned and up. Just one verb, two words one verb. And this, music, is the object. It is the direct object. It receives the action. What is turned up? The music is turned up.
Okay. So that’s the easy way to use these phrasal verbs, but there is another way that we do it all the time. It’s very very very common. We can also say, “We turned the music up.” Now do you see what is different here? We have the subject and the verb is separated, it is split, it is in two parts. Turned and up. And the direct object is here, the music. It is in between it is in the middle of the phrasal verb. Now these sentences mean the exact same thing. No different at all. Now there is one more rule where you have to do something special when you use pronouns, and well talk about that next.
Okay, so the next part involves pronouns. So let’s talk about what is a pronoun. A pronoun is a small word that replaces a noun. So for example he, she, it, me, herself… all of these are pronouns. They talk about another noun. They refer to something else and they take the place of it. Now when we have a pronoun and a phrasal verb, the pronoun must go in the middle of the phrasal verb. That might sound confusing; let’s look at an example.
“The music was too quiet.” We could not hear the music, it was too quiet. We weren’t having fun, we were trying to party! It was too quiet! “So we turned up it.” Now that is incorrect. That does not sound correct to anyone who speaks English. Why? Because here we have a pronoun, and the pronoun must go in the middle of the phrasal verb. So the correct way to say this is: “So we turned it up”. This is very important. It sounds very bad and it is usually incorrect, especially when writing” if you write a pronoun after the phrasal verb. It must go in the middle. So again lets look at this. We have the… well.. Let’s forget about this part of the sentence. We have the subject, we have the verb, here you have the object and it is a pronoun. So it must go after the first part of the phrasal verb. And finally you have the preposition of the phrasal verb.
Now one way to practice is to look up a lot of phrasal verbs. They’re everywhere and they mean many different things and they’re very important. Look up a list of phrasal verbs and then just try to make sentences using both normal nouns and pronouns. And remember when you use a pronoun like he, she, it, or me, something like that, then they must go in the middle of the phrasal verb. Cool.
I hope that helps guys, if you like this video as always, please click the like button. If you want to see more grammar videos, vocabulary videos, culture videos, whatever, subscribe to SOLEX and we will show you more. Thanks guys have a good day!
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