Name: VERBS to PHRASAL VERBS: Their meaning changes!
Uploaded: 2025-02-28T01:22:22.000Z
Duration: 10 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

Phrasal verbs, oh, everyone hates them because they're so confusing, and they have a couple different meanings sometimes, and they're just kind of weird and awkward and difficult.

A phrasal verb is a verb with a preposition.

And I'll tell you how this lesson came about, or how I thought of this lesson.

I was riding my bicycle on a beautiful day, and I was riding next to the lake, Lake Ontario, not that beautiful, and I saw a sign that said, we are cleaning up Lake Ontario.

And if you've ever been to Lake Ontario, not Ontario Lake, it's the lake in Toronto, in the surrounding area, it's pretty dirty, it's polluted, it's not really safe to swim in it.

I mean, we could, but you might die or get really sick.

I don't think that I've ever put my body in the lake, just because it's so dirty.

And when you're there, come visit me and I give you some lessons.

You can take private online lessons with me, englishwithronnie.com, www.englishwithronnie.com.

So I'm riding my bike, and the sign says, cleaning up Lake Ontario.

And I thought, hmm, why did the sign say cleaning up and not clean-ing Lake Ontario?

Why does it say cleaning up Lake Ontario and not cleaning Lake Ontario?

So I thought about it, and this is what I came up with.

So, to clean something, the base verb, we clean dirt.

We can wipe something, use some toxic chemicals, get that really shiny there.

But if we clean something up, like an object, we're not necessarily just removing the dirt or the dust.

So it's kind of hard to clean a lake, you just, like, get some spray, it's clean.

But if we clean up the lake, we're taking the bad shit out of it, we're taking out all the chemicals.

They're taking out the chemicals, they're taking out the garbage, all the crap that's in there that doesn't belong.

You can clean your room, you can dust it, you can get the dirt out.

But if you clean up your room, you're taking the garbage out, making your bed, making sure it's all beautiful.

So you're cleaning up your room, or cleaning your room is very different.

You can clean up the lake because you take stuff out of it.

Oh, I forgot, we can also use the past tense.

So I can say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, hey, guess what?

Or if you're doing it now, in the process, I'm cleaning my room.

I cleaned up the area, or I'm cleaning up the area.

So, if we find something, we look for something specific, like, oh, look, I found my red marker.

But if we add find out, or the past tense found out, it means we discover information.

We discover something that we didn't know before.

It can be through observation or through learning.

You can say, oh, I found out through this video that there's a difference between phrasal verbs and just regular verbs.

The past tense is easy, it's just picked.

We have to say it like a T, we have to say picked.

So, we write it like an E-D, but it sounds like a T sound, so we say picked.

Pick or picked means you choose something.

Oh, I picked this shirt today because it's a beautiful colour.

But if you pick up something, it's different.

Maybe if you're ordering food, people will say, oh, do you want delivery or pick up?

So, pick up means you retrieve, or less formal, get something.

So, I can go and pick up a takeout order, or get.

I can lift something, like, oh, hold on, let me pick up the marker off the table.

You've already chosen it, you're just physically actually lifting it.

So, you'll hear people say, oh, yeah, I went to the bar and I picked up a guy last night.

One of them means, like, get, the other one means lift.

So, if you pick up somebody at the bar, it means that you've lured them into your bedroom.

That's even a hard one to say because the spelling looks so weird.

So, if I brought something or I bring something, I mean I physically carry it with me to another place.

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VERBS to PHRASAL VERBS: Their meaning changes!

weird

pronunciation

expression

necessarily