Confusing Phrasal Verbs with Similar Meanings | Improve English Fluency

we need to have a talk about phrasal verbs okay so phrasal verbs can be very confusing they can be very annoying but they're very important to learn because we use them quite often especially when speaking now today i want to look at some phrasal verbs that well they these can be very confusing because their meaning is similar nevertheless there are some slight differences which i want to teach you and this is really going to help with your comprehension and your overall english fluency so all of that is coming right up hey everyone my name is wes from interactiveenglishvideos.com the channel that's all about helping you practice and improve your english skills and today we're talking about phrasal verbs and well we're going to be talking about why some of them are so confusing so let's just go ahead and start with these two phrasal verbs right here burn up and burn down now when i first started teaching english and you know i was having to learn a lot about the english language and one of the things that i came across was just trying to show how crazy the english language could be and somebody was asking a question and they said how is it possible that a house can burn down at the same time it's burning up that just doesn't make any sense but it it's true that can happen because if we have this sentence and somebody says oh my god my house is burning down all right it means the same thing and somebody could say oh my god my house is burning up so both of these phrasal verbs mean that something is destroyed by fire and in the example that i just gave you you could use either phrasal verb you could say my house is burning down or my house is burning up either one of them it's okay they mean the same thing but there are there there is a slight difference between these two phrasal verbs because if you say that something is burning down what that makes me think of is some type of structure like a home or a building or a bridge and when it burns down that structure is just destroyed and often it may just collapse if we're talking about something that burns up it makes me think of something that is perhaps smaller like an individual item not always because you could say that a home is burning up but i think uh you you will typically use this with smaller individual items paper a book or perhaps photo albums let's use that as an example so if you have this home and your home is burning down inside the home maybe you have some photo albums it's a smaller item and if it's destroyed by the fire then you would say my photo albums burned up in the fire they were destroyed by the fire but another word that i want to give you to help you probably better understand it would be that it was consumed by this fire i think that that word may help you make a distinction between burn down and burn up so if something burns up it's really consumed you could also use the phrasal verb when you you get rid of energy when you consume energy you can burn up calories and the other thing that i would say about burn up i think there is a level of intensity that this is happening uh right in front of you it's intense it's really hot it's getting hotter and hotter and in that case think of the same way if somebody has a fever they might say wow your forehead is burning up you're really burning up it's intense it's getting hot and and that is another way in which you could use this phrasal verb so in my original example of saying that my house is burning down or my house is burning up i think they are interchangeable you could use either one but i think it's because you are talking about something that is happening right at that moment you are watching this structure getting destroyed by the fire my house is burning down you are watching the the home getting consumed and it's very intense my house is burning up if we're going to talk about this in the past and it's already happened i think in that case most people would use burn down and you could say last year my home burned down all right you're probably not going to use burn up if you're talking about something that that's larger like a home you may use it if you are looking at it at that moment and you see that the fire is consuming it it's very intense you you could say oh no my house is burning up so again even though these phrasal verbs have a very similar meaning there are some slight differences between the two now let's look at the phrasal verbs walk up and walk down so let me give you an example perhaps you are looking for a restaurant and you ask somebody on the street hey do you know where this restaurant is and they say oh it's it's just right over there just just walk down the street and you'll see it or maybe they say just walk up the street and you'll see it in this case that both are correct you can use either one because walk down and walk up it means that you are just walking to some place i would say that there can be some subtle differences because you can take geography into consideration so for example if a person is going to be walking uphill then i'm more likely to use walk up just just walk up the street and you'll see it if the person's going to be walking downhill then i'm probably going to use down just walk down the street and you'll see it and if it's flat well then you can use either one i would say that i i think that in spoken english people are more likely going to use walk down now one way we can check this is using a great resource like google's engram viewer which pretty much shows you how common different words and phrases are and you can compare the two so i can compare walk up and walk down and when i looked it up lo and behold i saw that their usage is very similar one is not that much more common than the other and then i was thinking wait maybe am i wrong is it just me that i would use walk down and a lot of other people would use walk up perhaps that is the case but we can look at it a little closer in depth because if you use walk up it can also mean something that's a little different so walk up can mean to uh to uh to walk to a person or place with a level of confidence that you are feeling very confident you have something you want to say and you might walk right up to some person or you walk up to some place let me give you some examples i could say she walked up to her boss and said i quit all right she walked up to her boss she was very confident and and really had something important to say another example uh would be he walked up to her and asked her out on a date again in that situation you are walking to someone but it really there really is a level of confidence that you have when you are going to this person or or this place so when i went back to google engram viewer i was a little more specific with my uh with my phrase and i put in walk down the street and walk up the street and yes in that case uh you can see that walk down the street is more more common than walk up the street and this also applies to drive if you want to say drive up or drive down perhaps you're looking for a grocery store and you ask somebody and they say oh it's it's just just drive down the road and you'll see it in about 10 minutes or just drive up the road and you'll see it in 10 minutes again they're interchangeable they mean the same thing you are driving to some place but i think it also applies if somebody's going to be driving uphill you could use drive up if they're driving downhill drive down and if it's flat either one but once again i think drive down is going to be used more often in spoken english now let's look at these phrasal verbs take off and lift off so i could say the helicopter is taking off or the helicopter is lifting off both of them are correct and both of them kind of mean the same thing in this case but these phrasal verbs do have a bit of a difference so for example take off refers to an aircraft or a bird or an insect that leaves the ground and begins to fly liftoff refers to the action of some aircraft or spacecraft that is leaving the ground and typically with liftoff i i kind of think of going straight up you are going straight up from a particular point so i could you could say that a rocket could lift off the ground or a helicopter could lift off the ground a hot air balloon could lift off the ground a drone could lift off the ground so if we're talking about takeoff i could use takeoff with all of those as well i could say the rocket took off the helicopter took off the hot air balloon it also took off even the drone it took off because i can use takeoff with with all of those as well as many more if we're talking about well like birds insects and planes take off is used much more often than lift off the reason why i think somebody would use liftoff would be if they they just want to be a little more specific and precise when whenever they're speaking or perhaps writing and they want to say that that this aircraft is leaving the ground and it's kind of moving straight up so you think of a rocket a helicopter a hot air balloon a drone those are things that can lift off but they could also take off as well i hope that you have a little bit of a better understanding about the differences between these phrasal verbs even though in certain instances they are interchangeable and you could use either one and finally i hope that i hope that you learned something new and if you did learn something new please hit that like button thank you guys so much for watching and i will see you next time

Channel: Interactive English

Views: 16,003

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Keywords: interactive english, learn english, learn english phrasal verbs, phrasal verb lesson, english phrasal verb lesson, learn phrasal verbs, confusing phrasal verbs, phrasal verbs with similar meanings, english vocabulary, build english vocabulary, burn up vs burn down, walk up vs walk down, take off vs lift off, improve english fluency, phrasal verbs in english, phrasal verbs grammar, phrasal verb burn up, phrasal verb burn down, phrasal verb take off, phrasal verb lift off

Id: E6kikSWsBbM

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020