4th of ESO students are currently dealing with Phrasal Verbs which can help students understand other people. Certainly, they are popular in spoken English. They seem to be difficult to learn as they can be quite confusing because their definitions aren’t always easy to guess and there are thousands of them.
Multi-word verbs are two or more words that together either have a literal meaning or act as a completely new word, with a meaning separate from the original words. For example, pick up means to “grab” or “lift”, very different from the definitions of pick and up alone. This phrasal verb also has a figurative or idiomatic meaning that goes beyond the literal interpretation as you can see in this sentence: I picked up some Italian when I was working in Rome.
Fear not and start using them in everyday conversations like this: My alarm goes off at 6.45 a.m. I usually feel sleepy and find it hard to get up, but my morning coffee soon wakes me up.
