Why we hate phrasal verbs

Why we hate phrasal verbs

When it comes to learning or teaching English as a second or foregn language, phrasal verbs have to be the worst. But, just what is so bad about them? It seems they have been designed to be as difficult as possible, either to keep true English for the true native speakers, (whoever they are) to keep teachers in work and academies in business, or just to make life difficult for the poor students who have to learn them and the poor teachers who have to try to explain what they mean and, with greater difficulty, why it might be necessary to know them.

So, why are they so difficult?
Well, for one thing, they're certainly not very logical. How is it possible that "let", which means permit, can be combined with "down", meaning movement from a higher to a lower place, to make "let down" which means to disappoint or fail somebody? And anyway, if it means dissapoint, why not just say dissappoint?

It gets worse: let down doesn't just mean disappoint, it also means deflate. How are we supposed to know which meaning is the right one when we hear or read this? Take a look at this joke and see for yourself. A quick look at any decent dictionary will reveal that most phrasal verbs have two or three often comletely different meanings, some have even more!
And worse: Even if we might manage to figure out which meaning is the right one when we meet these devious word combinations, we should be very careful about actually trying to use them. Not only do they have multiple meanings, they can often only be used in very particular circumstances.

For example?
"come up with" means suggest and idea or plan. In the following sentence we could use either come up with or suggest: "We didn't know what to do until Pablo came up with/suggested a plan." Great. but you can do all sorts of things with suggest that you should never attempt with come up with:
"Are you suggsting I'm lying?" is fine but "Are you comming up with I'm lying?" is just wrong. "Let me suggest something" sounds normal. "Let me come up with something" sounds very odd.
 "Come up with" is a fickle friend, only to be used with a very restricted list of similar meaning nouns: come up with a plan/ idea/solution/answer- "Suggest" is much more user-friendly allowing all sorts of nouns and a splendid choice of structures.

Sounds like teaching and learning them is impossible!
No, but it can be hard work. They can be tough to explain, hard to understand in relation to the meaning of their components, confusing because of multiple meanings and frustrating because of restrictions on the way they are used. Unfortunately for us all, they are part of the language!

So, what can we do?
The good news is that although there are thousands of phrasal verbs, there is a much smaller number of common ones. For elementary and intermediate learners of English, these should be enough.
As we have already pointed out, often you don't actually have to use them! Dissapoint will do just as well as let down. That's fine as long as you are doing the talking, but you have no control over the words other people choose to use when they speak to you. So here's the idea: At least at lower levels, focus your learning on understanding, rather than using phrasal verbs - leave that for later on. Collect examples which will help you get a feel for how a phrasal verb is used. The whole idea of this blog is to find examples in popular songs and draw a little attention to them. These are songs we could be very familiar with, but may not have paused to think about their exact meaning. the examples connect with memories we already have. We start to observe what until now we had only seen.