I picked up a lot of vocabulary during my reading, and I wrote many of the words down in this book. Naturally, without repeating them, it’s in vain. Now, when I look at the words in this book, I’m often unable to understand or translate them. I know that basically, comprehending a lot of vocabulary expands your ability to understand quickly spoken English.
In the last two days, I was listening to a British English teacher. I’m really interested in phrases and phrasal verbs, and he explained them carefully. He described how their meanings change depending on the prepositions, especially when a second preposition is added. He also explained when phrasal verbs can be separated and when they cannot.
I found out that transitive phrasal verbs can usually be split, but intransitive ones cannot. For example: He takes over the phone or He takes the phone over. And then: The manuals take over from the dinosaurs. In this last example, there is no object, so the verb is intransitive and cannot be split. Why? Because there isn’t any object that could be placed between the two parts of the verb.
For instance, you cannot say: The manuals take from the dinosaurs over—that would sound strange, of course