The SECRET Way to Understand ALL Phrasal Verbs

The SECRET Way to Understand ALL Phrasal Verbs | Phrasal verbs are one of the most confusing parts of the English language. Many English learners try to memorize hundreds of phrasal verbs, but they still struggle to understand them in real conversations.
So what if there was a secret way to understand phrasal verbs naturally?
In this powerful episode of Mind Life In English, host Profe Lao reveals a smarter and more effective way to understand phrasal verbs without memorizing endless lists. Instead of learning them randomly, you’ll discover how to understand the logic behind them and start recognizing them instantly when you hear native speakers.
🎙️ In this episode, you will learn:
• Why phrasal verbs feel so difficult for English learners
• The hidden meaning behind common phrasal verb particles (up, out, off, on, etc.)
• How native speakers naturally understand phrasal verbs
• A simple mental technique to guess the meaning of new phrasal verbs
• How to improve your listening and speaking with phrasal verbs
If you want to speak English more naturally, confidently, and fluently, understanding phrasal verbs is essential. This episode will help you stop memorizing and start thinking like a real English speaker.
Whether you're an intermediate or advanced learner, this episode will change the way you approach phrasal verbs forever.
🎧 Listen carefully, take notes, and start unlocking the secret system behind English phrasal verbs.

Transcript

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Hello everyone. This video might change your phrasal verb life. This might change the way that you perceive phrasal verbs forever. Maybe. I don't know. Let's see. There is a lovely student who left a comment on one of my YouTube videos, and I can't remember the name or the username of this person. I'm sorry if it's you, you can let me know down below in the comments on this video. But this person told me to check out a YouTube channel by the name of Kevin Buckley. He said that this channel helped him understand phrasal verbs better than ever before. So I said, huh, okay, I'll check it out. And he was right. The student was right. This is a great channel for understanding phrasal verbs. I personally have never seen anyone teach or explain phrasal verbs like this. So essentially what he does is he takes the prepositions, the common prepositions of phrasal verbs. Words like up, down, on, off, out, over, etc. And he finds all the meanings of these prepositions in the context of phrasal verbs. So phrasal verbs are a verb and a preposition. Like for example, turn off. Turn is the verb, off is the preposition. Turn off has a different meaning than turn because of the preposition off. So Kevin Buckley has found all the explanations, all the meanings of the preposition off. And when you know all of these meanings, then you'll be able to understand all the phrasal verbs that use off, and it will make sense to you. And what he shows is that a lot of these meanings, or maybe even all of these meanings, are connected. And so if you know all of these meanings, then you can understand the general idea, maybe even the general feeling of what off means when we use it in phrasal verbs. And probably the best thing about his videos is that he uses visual depictions, visual representations of these phrasal verbs. Overall, I think this could be a revolutionary way of teaching and learning and understanding phrasal verbs. I want to give you an example of what he teaches. So I wrote down everything that he taught about the preposition off, all of the meanings with some examples. Some of the examples I took directly from him, some of them I went and found my own examples because I didn't really like his examples, so I changed them. So I'm going to teach you what he teaches, but in my way. So the first overall meaning of the preposition off when it's used in phrasal verbs is this general idea of detach, separate, and remove. And he uses a physical depiction like something separating from another thing, right? You have like a thing, and then something is detaching or separating, or you are removing this thing. So this kind of thing, that is a general idea of off. So here are some examples of that. If you have a bag or like a suitcase and it has a handle and the handle breaks, we say the handle breaks off. And it just means that the handle breaks and detaches or separates from the bag. It breaks, it breaks off. Or you can look at a tree and the leaf falls off the tree, but the leaf is really separating from the tree or detaching from the tree. It falls off the tree. Imagine there's a man walking on the street and he has a hat on his head, and the wind blows off his hat. The wind blows off his hat. So the wind blows and his hat becomes detached or separated from his head, right? It blows off, it gets separated, or you have a list of names and you cross off two of those names, cross off two names, you are removing these names from the list. Or you could think of it as separating these names from the rest of the names. So even though remove, separate, and detach are not interchangeable verbs, like we use them in different contexts, when we zoom out and think about this in a more general way, they're all very connected. It's all like a similar idea. Now, Kevin Buckley is very thorough. So sometimes these words separate, detach, and remove will have all of their own videos and explanations, or he will teach them as like separate lessons. But really, I would teach it as like all the same thing because it's all really connected. And I'm just giving you some examples of phrasal verbs and sentences where off means these things. He gives you even more examples, more phrasal verbs. One of my critiques about his videos is that sometimes he uses phrasal verbs and sentences that are not super common. You know, that's one of my biggest problems with other English teachers. If you've been watching my channel for a long time, is that sometimes I think teachers don't really think about what are the most common things that students will really encounter. And they will kind of forget about that and they just teach something that exists, but it's not as common compared to other sentences that they could teach or other phrasal verbs or whatever. So sometimes he he uses some things, some examples that I'm like, uh, that's not really a good example. So I went and found my own examples with my own phrasal verbs, but but the general idea that he's teaching, the general meanings and explanations are pretty spot on, like pretty accurate, pretty good, and definitely useful. Another general meaning of off in phrasal verbs is leave, move away, or even he uses the verb emit, which is not a common verb, but it's used in very specific situations, like when a fire is emitting heat. It's just like saying that heat is coming off the fire, it's coming from the fire. It's just a technical word. But but the main point is one of the meanings of off is to leave or move away, which makes sense and is connected to the first meaning we talked about, which is detach, remove, separate, because when you remove or separate something, that thing is kind of going away. Like when the leaf falls off the tree, it is detaching from the tree, it's also moving away from the tree. It's leaving the tree. So you see how this is all kind of connected. It's still this kind of visual, like this, but it the move away and the leave is more focused on this part, and the detached separate remove is more focused on this part. Are you following me? It's easier with his physical depictions of this, you know, his his little animations that he that he has. The videos are very well made, I must say. My videos, I usually just talk and talk and talk about this stuff, which for very visual learners, it might not be so helpful. I'm not sure. You can let me know in the comments if you like the way that I teach phrasal verbs, but I don't know. I'm trying my best here. So some examples of off meaning move away or leave in phrasal verbs are anytime we say that someone or something drives off, walks off, runs off, sails off, if it's a sailboat, flies off, it can fly. This kind of phrasal verb, it just means that the person or the thing moved away or left in this way. So if a person walks off, it means that they left or they moved away by walking. So they walked away, they they left by walking. So he uses an example of there's a house and there's a car next to the house. And that car drives away. The car drives off. So sometimes we say that. We say, like, yeah, the car drove off. It just means the car drove away. The car moved away, it left. So the general idea here is that something departed or it moved away. And it's not so different from the idea of detaching. You know, you can even think of the car as being attached to the house and then it detaches and goes away. Not literally, but it's still this kind of action because you have the house here, this is this is the car, and the car is going like this. And then another important meaning that he teaches about the preposition off is to stop, deactivate, or disengage. And this one's very interesting because a lot of us already probably know this. We know when we say turn off the light, it's like to deactivate the light or turn off the TV, turn off your phone, right? We use this with a lot of things that you can turn on and off. It just means to activate or deactivate the thing. You can also say switch off the light, right? The the switch is the thing that you move to turn on the light or turn it off. The light switch, we call it. So you can say turn off the light or switch off the light. So this is very common for stuff around the house or really anywhere, you know, anywhere that we have running water, like turn on the water, turn off the water. So this one we already kind of know, but you might not realize that this meaning of off is also used in other phrasal verbs that don't seem related, but they are. Another common phrasal verb with this meaning is get off work. He gets off work at five, to get off work. To get off work just means to disengage from work, to stop work at the end of the day. So it's like you're working all day, and then all of a sudden you stop working, you you become disengaged, you're no longer occupied with work. You're off work, you're free. Work has stopped. This even relates to the first meaning we talked about, which is to detach. So it's like you're at work all day, and then you get off work, which is like you are detaching from the workday. So if someone says that they get off work at a certain time, it just means that their work ends at a certain time. It stops. Another meaning of the preposition off is to explode. And this could be in a physical sense or also with noise, with sound. So that's why we say, like, I set off the alarm. Now be careful here because I set the alarm. If we just say I set the alarm, that just means that I programmed the alarm. I scheduled it, right? I have to set my alarm for tomorrow morning. I want to wake up at eight. So I'm gonna set my alarm for eight. But when we say, oh, I set off the alarm, that means I did something that made the alarm explode with noise, right? So maybe I set off the fire alarm. I caused a fire and I set off the fire alarm. The fire alarm exploded because of me, like it started. So that is one kind of random meaning of off that you might encounter. And then the final meaning of off that Kevin Buckley talks about is just the word from. So sometimes we use off in phrasal verbs when it really just means from. So, like if you have a ball and you're bouncing the ball off of the wall. So the ball is getting thrown at the wall, it bounces on the wall and it bounces back to you. It comes back. That is the ball bouncing from the wall. So if the ball bounces off the wall, it just means that it bounces from the wall. Or maybe you have a backpack and the straps you put on a chair so that the backpack is hanging off the chair. You could also say it's hanging from the chair. It's the same idea, right? So sometimes we say it's hanging off the chair, it just means it's hanging from the chair. You can also say that you downloaded something off of the internet or off a particular website. I downloaded this off this website. It just means I downloaded this from this website. So these are all the meanings that Kevin Buckley taught about the preposition off when it's used in phrasal verbs. I think most of them are connected, most of them are related, and you can kind of get a sense, a general sense for what off means. Most of us native speakers don't even know this. We don't know why we use these prepositions and these phrasal verbs, and we don't really know what it means or what it's replacing in the sentence. We just use it because we know how it sounds and it just sounds right in this situation. And it's just kind of like a feeling. It's like a feeling that you know. And maybe if you're on your fluency journey in English and you're making progress and you're listening to native speakers, maybe you will just naturally start to feel the meaning, like even unconsciously, subconsciously recognize the patterns of these phrasal verbs and these prepositions. Maybe you don't need these Kevin Buckley videos, like maybe it will just overcomplicate it for you or make you think about things that you don't even need to think about. Maybe, but for some students, it might bring clarity, it might help to understand the why and the reasoning or you know, the method to the madness of phrasal verbs. Like, why are phrasal verbs like this? Because normally on my channel, I just teach that phrasal verbs are crazy and you just have to memorize them and like you just have to learn them little by little, but don't stress about it too much because a lot of the times we just use the same ones over and over again, and we don't use all of them that exist. And yeah, you a lot of times you can kind of guess the meaning based on the context. So, you know, that's that's basically what I say on my channel. But I think it is good sometimes to have a bit more of a formal lesson where you learn some kind of more technical or logical approach to this complicated topic. So I'm really glad that whoever you are out there, you you commented on one of my YouTube videos and you told me about Kevin Buckley. And I'm really happy that I can share with you guys this channel. It's not a big channel, it's not a famous channel. He doesn't have many subscribers, but he has a small collection of these videos that I think are helping a lot of students, those who have found these videos. So I wanted to share it with you guys so that you guys can take a look and see if you think that it's gonna help you with phrasal verbs or uh maybe not. I really am interested in your feedback, in your perception, uh, your perspective. So if you could take a look and and then maybe come back here and let me know in the comments what you what you thought, what you think about his channel and his videos, and if it helped you. If you liked what I did in this video, I can watch his other videos about other prepositions, and I can write down everything he says, and I can put it into my own words, and I can teach it on this channel. I can explain it to you like in my way using what he talks about. So if you prefer that, you can let me know, and I can do that with other prepositions. In this video, I just talked about off, but there are several others that I could talk about. And if you go to his channel and you go to the playlists tab, that's hard to say. Playlists tab, playlist tab, playlists tab. Sometimes it's hard to say plural words in English that end in S and then something after that. Playlists tab, playlists tab, play, you know, even even we struggle with the pronunciation, trust me. The amount of times, well, it's not a lot, but sometimes when I'm filming, I have to repeat what I just said because I fumble my words. I mess up, and I'm a native English speaker. So if you go to his channel and you look at the playlists tab, you will see all of his videos on each preposition nicely organized. So you can watch them in sections. You can watch all the videos on the word on or on up or down or over. All right, so I think that's everything I wanted to share with you guys in this video. Thank you for being here. I'm trying um this microphone again. Some of you might recognize this if you've been with me from the very beginning. I used to use this microphone uh like a long time ago, like over a year ago. It's not that long, but for me it feels like a long time. I'm just trying it out because, well, I'm also filming in the nighttime. I have this yellow lamp right next to me illuminating me, so that's why I kind of look more yellow and and the quality is a little different than when I film during the day. But I think I'm gonna start filming in the nighttime, at least here in this apartment in Brazil, uh, at least for the month of February until I leave, because it's just too loud during the day. I just can't between the construction and the and the people outside and the traffic and the everything, all the noises. So I really like um the the sound level, like the silence in the nighttime. And also I'm trying this microphone because my other microphone is really great for isolating my voice when there's sound. This one's not so good at that, but it's good to use if it's quiet and I want to hold it. It's good for holding because it's it's small and light. The other one's not very good for holding, so it's better to use when I have like a desk or table to put it on, but I can't really do that easily out here in the living room. So anyway, so I'm I'm using this for now. Hopefully the audio quality is good. Let me know what you think about the audio quality. I will use my my other microphone again, of course, but um I'm trying this one out because I would like to use it sometimes when when I can and when it would be better because they they have different like pros and cons. Like this microphone and the other one, they are good for different kinds of um situations, I guess. So, anyways, that's it. Thank you for being here with me. I appreciate you, and I will see you in the next video. A bye bye now.