Hi.
Reading sci-fi or scientific American, ten things coming to you in the future.
Speaking of coming to you, I would like to talk about phrasal verbs that we can use in
the business environment, whether it is an interview or just working with colleagues
I'm going to work on seven of them with you.
First, we'll talk about what a phrasal verb is, then we'll talk about the prepositions
that we're going to use, and how they're changed by the verbs we'll add, and how you can use
them in a business environment.
So...
"E" says "on" or "off", so it doesn't really help us right now because we're not going
I want to read something to you, and then we're going to insert later on what the appropriate
phrasal verb will be once you learn what they are.
"Hey, Jay, I have to cancel the 8 a.m. meeting tomorrow."
"Why?"
"What's up, E?"
"Mr. E, the boss asked me to accept more work on the Helen Williams account."
"Yeah, she wanted me to review it in detail with you."
"Mr. E, we were supposed to look for information online about the important parts of the account
and contact her to give her the information later."
"I heard you two don't have a good relationship."
E. "Well, that would have required you to get the right information from the right people."
Sounds okay, nothing to change.
But when we speak as English people to one another, we will use either idioms or phrasal
verbs to contain the same amount of information, but in a smaller, recognizable pattern, word
And a pattern can be anything like "on my shirt", how the red and white goes, means
something that is repeated, and because it's repeated, it's easily understood.
So, we've done this sentence on the board, and I'm going to go right now, and we're going
to get ready to teach you the prepositions and the phrasal verbs so that we can put them
in the right place at the end of this lesson.
So, we did all these beautiful sentences, and you don't know why.
We're going to go to the board and figure it out by looking at the phrasal verbs and
So, why don't we start off with what is a preposition?
A preposition, I look at it as pre-positioned, is we've designated or we say a preposition
tells us where something is going to go.
We use it in sentences to tell us how, where, and why.
And because of its position, it gives us an indication between the verb and the subject
What's another one we can say for a preposition?
"For".
So, that preposition tells us how the verb and the object or the subject are working
out.
When we use phrasal verbs, we take prepositions plus verbs.
The verb still keeps most of its meaning, but as you change the preposition, it changes
the meaning of what it - when you add a preposition, it changes the general meaning of the two
So, what I'm going to do today is I'm going to kind of give you a general outline of what
the prepositions I'm working with today mean, and you'll see how when we add it to the verb,
And then when we go back to our sentences on the board, you'll go, "Oh my gosh.
This is how it works, and this is why it means this."
First thing we should look up is the preposition "off".
When somebody says "off", you probably know it most commonly from "turn off the lights".
It's a movement away or a detaching.
Now, I'm not going through all the definitions, because "off" has about five definitions.
I'm just going to deal with the ones that we need to work on with our phrasal verbs
In future lessons, I'll tell you different meanings of them, and you can see when you
see them all together how you can figure out what the preposition or how the preposition
affects a sentence or a phrasal verb.
In today's meaning, "off" means movement away or detach, and you know that already.
If you jump off of something, you detach or leave it.
When something's on, it's touching.
A good example is, let's do it on Monday.
Well, when we say do something on Monday and usually use the preposition "on" for days,
it means there's an attachment or a movement on, right?
We can also say "touching", "move", or "continuing".
So, an example for "continuing" is "move on", "continue".
Okay?
"Over".
Funny enough, because you would never think of this, but when we use the preposition "over"
with other verbs, it can mean communicating or considering, thinking about.
Ooh.
It means to communicate, to consider, think about, or communicate.
"Up" means collecting, coming together.
"Approaching" means coming closer to.
When you say the car pulled up to the house, the car came closer to the house.
"Completing" - we'll finish up on Monday.
And "improvement" - let's fix it up.
So, I've given you some examples there and told you how the basic meanings...
Now, let's look at how we use these prepositions in these phrasal verbs to create new meanings
Remember we said "off" means to call off, or say "off" means to detach or move away?
If you call off something, it means to cancel an event.
When you cancel and you move away from it, you're not going to do it anymore, so you're
"Take on" - it means to accept more work.
Here, we say "attach" or "touching".
Well, if you have one thing and you attach another, it's taking on more work.
So, you accept to have more work or more responsibility.
So, if you take on more work at work, you're going to have more work.
"Get on".
But in this case, "on" means what?
We said "on" means touching or attach, or to have a good relationship.
Well, when you have a relationship with someone, you're either close or far away.
If you're attached, you're probably touching.
So, if I say I get on well with him or her, it means we are close.
"Over".
Okay?
"Depends on".
Somebody needs something to work.
Okay?
So, you need to have some kind of touching or community, like a contact in order for
This has to be attached to me to work.
And that's why we say "depends on".
So, it depends on what time it is.
If Fred is not in contact, it won't work.
If we're not attached at the right time or happening at the right time, it won't work.
"Over".
"Over" means communicate or considering.
So, when you go over something, it means to review in detail.
You have to consider, think about something, and probably communicate it with someone else.
When I go over your work, I'm going to look at it, look over the work, but then I will
communicate what I found in that work.
I will think about it and communicate it.
"Look up".
"Up" means collecting, approaching, completing, and improvement.
When you look up information, you look information on a book or online, that means you're collecting
it.
So, you're collecting information, you're looking up to approach knowledge, understanding.
So, we're using these two together down here.
You want to contact a client and give them information.
When you follow up with somebody, you're going to collect the information, right?
Approach the client and complete the meeting by informing them so they have more information
Okay?
So, now I've shown you how we've gone from taking our prepositions to help form new meaning
And as you can see, "call", you know what "call" means, make a call.
Call off, you're going to call someone to move away.
"Take", when you take something, you bring it to yourself.
Take on, and we said "on" means to attach.
And you can go, "Oh my gosh, yeah.
By themselves they mean one thing."
But just by adding these prepositions to each verb, we've increased the meaning so you can
And when we go back to the board in a second, you're going to see how we're going to
replace the sentences or the sentence parts that we started with at the beginning of this
video with these new phrasal verbs, and how we can say shorter sentences make much more
sense, be fuller with meaning, and make you clear, and like a native speaker.
Don't forget, we're also going to do homework and bonus now.
Okay, so now that I've explained the phrasal verbs to you and the prepositions, let's put
So, we did the sentence, we'll go over it one more time.
"Hey Jay, I have to cancel the 8 a.m. meeting tomorrow."
"Why?
The boss asked me to accept more work on the Helen Williams account."
"Yeah, she wanted me to review it in detail with you.
We are supposed to look for information online about the important parts of the account and
contact her to give her the information later."
"I heard you two don't have a good relationship."
"Well, that would have required you to get the right information from the right people."
Quick snapshot, like picture, and now let's go into the phrasal verbs.
"I have to cancel", what did we say "cancel" was?
You can do the same thing with a wedding or any event.
That's right, "call off".
When you cancel an event, you can call it off.
Call off a wedding, call off a meeting, call off the 8 a.m. meeting tomorrow.
So they're going to call it off, and we're going to try and figure out why.
The boss asked me to take on or accept more work on."
Okay.
Now, one of the things I want you to pay attention, I'm taking my time, of course, to let you
try and figure out before I get there.
Or this phrasal verb or the phrasal verbs I'm using can replace.
"So, the boss asked me to take on the Helen Williams account."
That means more, you know, take on, take on yourself some responsibility, or take it on
"Yeah, she wanted me to review it in detail with you."
Okay.
"She wanted me to go over it with you."
Just as "on" means in addition, "to go over" means information.
So, we're going to go over it, review it with you.
We are supposed to look for...
I kind of cheated some of the words.
Well, one of the words is here already.
I'm sure you caught it already.
So, I'm going to erase it, but I don't need to because I'm going to replace it.
All of this has to go, and we can just put this, "look up", right?
To add on when we're looking up something, to inform ourselves.
We are supposed to look up the important parts of the account and what?
For "inform" and "communicate", "follow up".
We get the information and we give it back to somebody.
"Follow up", meaning in addition.
And you notice how this whole entire sentence just disappears, like myself.
Okay.
I heard you two don't have a good relationship.
Now, I'm getting rid of "don't" because I have to, and I'm going to change it over here.
Okay?
And I'm going to put it back in here because we need it, and I'm speaking to myself saying
the word "don't" is necessary to make this sentence make sense, so some of the times
you will notice I will change it to make it make sense, and it's necessary, but what I'm
trying to get you to understand is how these two words can contain all of this information,
and that's why we use phrasal verbs as opposed to just the verb or just the preposition.
It cuts down on how much we have to write, but it gives you the same amount of information.
And in this case, it's negative, "Don't get along" - not along, sorry - "Don't get on".
And if you remember, when we said you get on, you can have a good relationship.
When you don't get on, you have a bad relationship.
Now, what about this last sentence?
Well, that would have required you to get the right information from the right...
It's cumbersome, which means a lot, but not comfortable.
Okay.
I'm going to get rid of all of that.
All of it, let's go, like a sail.
And this is what I meant by I have to change the sentence in this case.
I can't just say "That depends on", it's not really enough, but you get the idea.
That depends on...
And you will notice how much shorter this particular sentence is compared to that long
And let's go over it just to make sure we have the same meaning that we started with.
So, Mr. E says, "Hey, Jay, I have to call off the 8am meeting tomorrow."
What's up, E?"
E says, "The boss asked me to take on the Helen Williams account."
It actually sounds better, right?
James, "Yeah, she wanted me to go over it with you."
E, "We were supposed to look up the important parts of the account and follow up later."
And I forgot to put this "follow up with her", because in this case, the boss, right?
So there are some things, as I said, we have to change a little bit, but we could have
said we're going to have to follow up later, but in this case, I want to say "follow up
Okay?
"I heard you two don't get along."
Well, that depends on who you spoke to.
So, there's that hidden information where it's like you had to speak to the right person
to get the right information to know if this is true.
I just go, "That depends on who you spoke to."
In that case, since you're speaking to - oh, listening to me and I'm speaking, I would
like to do a bonus and I teach you a few more phrasal verbs so we can go up to the magic
number 10 and give you some homework.
So, let's go and take a look.
When something drags, it usually means something follows behind or is on the floor being pulled.
Okay?
It is not moving quickly, that's why it's being dragged.
Think of when you see a mother with a child in the mall shopping, and the child's like,
In this case, when we say something drags on, it means to continue.
One of the meanings from "on", and we go - go on longer than needed.
So, if something drags on, some of you might say, "This video is dragging on.
It means you should have ended it five minutes ago."
That's what we mean by something drags on.
It went on longer than needed.
The meeting dragged on for, like, three hours.
The movie dragged on for almost infinity.
That takes the meaning from "up", from "approach".
Do you remember when we talked about - okay, "up" and "approach", but when you open up
to somebody, it means you talk about your personal life, or you talk about feelings
So, if you open up at work, you're going to talk about your personal life or your private
life.
If you open up to a lover or a loved one, you will tell them your innermost feelings,
how you really feel about something.
Dress up, as we said from "up", means to improve.
When we dress up, it means to make something look better.
One of the easiest things to think of is right now, I'm casual.
If I were to dress up, I would put on a tie, change this to a jacket, wear some pants,
comb back my hair, and I would be dressed up.
But it also means to make something look better.
Let's just say you're at work, and you have a project, and it's okay, you go, "We need
It means we need to improve it to make it look better, so maybe the boss likes it or
the client wants to get it, right?
So you're designing a new car, and you go, "We need to dress up the way this car is.
We're going to add some lights and some other details.
Doesn't necessarily mean it's better, but it looks better.
Okay.
So, now that I've given you three extra ones to use on, and you can use at work, especially
this one, you'll use that a lot.
"He just dragged on the meeting with his blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
The homework I'd like you to do is to write out your own conversation using at least four
of these phrasal verbs in a work situation.
You can think of an interview, you can think of a meeting, you can think of presenting
something to a client, and trying to use these words in the way that I've mentioned to you.
You could say to a client, "Hi, listen, tomorrow I've got something really desperate I have
to do, so I'm going to have to call off our meeting tomorrow."
Okay?
"Yeah, listen, but I will follow up with you on that next week."
Okay?
Why don't we go over it over the phone?
And I've just used three, making it up, walking around like I'm talking to a client.
You've done this with me, I know you've got a good handle on it.
And in case you don't, I would like you to go to...
Go to www.engvid.com, where you can do the test and test yourself to see how well you've
Also, don't forget to subscribe and you can get the latest video I have by ringing my
bell, ring my bell, somewhere around here, and we'll shoot you the latest video I do.
Also, as always, thank you very much for taking the time to watch and to learn.
We're a community, so try it out, and you can put some of these phrasal verbs, paragraphs
you try on YouTube or on engVid, where other students will join you and, you know, I'd
like to take a look and see what you're doing as well.
Anyway, listen, time for me to take off, and you have a good night.
Whenever you're watching this, I don't know.
Ciao.