Phrasal Verbs Reading Comprehension

The Problem with Phrasal Verbs.

Phrasal verbs are a big cause of stress for English-language learners, which is not surprising considering that there are more than ten thousand of them in English!

To complicate matters even more, most of these verbs have multiple meanings; on average between 5 and 6 meanings, but sometimes as many as 15!

Additionally, what phrasal verbs mean is not always obvious, sometimes their meaning is completely different to similar verbs. Lastly, they sometimes have an object, sometimes they don’t, sometimes you can separate them, sometimes you can’t and sometimes you have to.

Why bother?

Because there are so many of these verbs students might feel overwhelmed and try to avoid them completely. It is possible to speak English without using phrasal verbs at all as there is almost always an alternative to any given phrasal verb, in fact, the alternative might even sound more academic, more formal and may be more similar to a verb that the learner knows from their native language. So perhaps learners don’t need to use them at all.

On the other hand, one reason not ignore this type of verb is that native speakers use phrasal verbs a lot! Apparently, as a result, learners will encounter, on average, one in every 150 words of English they are exposed to! That might not seem like a lot, but in conversation they are likely to be even more frequent.

So how can learners make progress with all these verbs? Nobody can memorise 10,000 verbs, especially when most of them are so similar!

The importance of prioritising

Academic researchers discovered that although there are a lot of phrasal verbs, there are a limited number that are used again and again; they found that just 20 verb stems are used for 54% of all verbs used in the sample material.

They also found that just 8 different prepositions (out, up, on, back, down, in, over, and off) used with these 20 verbs accounted for half of all the phrasal verbs in the sample material.

Interestingly, just 25 phrasal verbs accounted for more than 30% of all phrasal verbs used in the sample texts, 100 verbs represented more than 50 percent of all the phrasal verbs used in the texts, and a list of 152 phrasal verbs represented 75% of all the examples in the sample texts.

So, the good news is that although there are 10,000 phrasal verbs, by learning just 152 (most of which are based on 20 verb stems and 8 particles) you can understand 75% of all the instances of phrasal verbs that you see and hear!

How to learn the most common phrasal verbs

Arguably, the best way to learn is by consuming as much English as possible! Nowadays, thanks to the internet, it is easy to do this, you can listen to the radio and podcasts, read news, novels and non-fiction and make conversation in English as much as possible. By doing this, you will encounter phrasal verbs again and again in their natural contexts and consequently your comprehension and recall of these verbs will improve dramatically.

A little practice goes a long way!

This specially created trainer will help you dominate these verbs with just a couple of minutes practice a day. Because the quiz is loaded with the 152 most common phrasal verbs, with various different examples to show their different meanings and uses, every time you use the trainer, you are presented with a random selection of these verbs to answer as many as possible in just 2 minutes. Then, when you finish you can review your results, see the corrections and even add your score to the leaderboard!

Academic references

The usual suspects – The 150 phrasal verbs that are used 75% of the time

Here is the complete list of the most frequently used examples. Amazingly, by remembering these 150 verbs you’ll be able to understand 75% of the phrasal verbs that you see and hear in English.