Every language poses challenges
to its learners: Romance languages have a whimsical subjunctive mode, German
has complicated declensions, Japanese has numeral classifiers, Swahili has its
noun cases, Basque has an ergative system (to say nothing of its auxiliary
verbs) and so on and so forth. Well… English has two main problem areas: pronunciation
and, of course, phrasal verbs. Today I’d like to center on the latter.
For the most part we can talk
around phrasal verbs. For instance, we can choose to say “I was educated by my
grandparents” or “I was reared by my grandparents” but let’s face it… Even
leaving semantic nuances aside, neither of those sentences sound as natural as
“I was brought up by my grandparents”. The situation becomes slightly trickier
when we realize that the one-word alternative does not always work. Do we really
want to say “I always rise at seven o’clock in the morning"? Do we even have a
realistic option in cases such as “turn on the television, please”?
In short, phrasal verbs are not
technically necessary but they are widely used by native speakers. They also
make your English sound more natural (I
screwed up), tactful (he passed away),
succint (he didn’t measure up) and
accurate (I dusted myself off). I believe
those are serious reasons to incorporate multi-word verbs into our repertoire.
These thoughts were running
through my head during a recent stroll down Unter den Linden avenue in Berlin,
the city one always goes back to.
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