We often receive questions about how to be good in everyday English. We guess students are pertaining to casual or informal conversations and how to sound more natural.
Most English learners focus on grammar, memorizing formal words for business letter writing but never really get into the normal way of talking to someone. You learn that outside the classroom and you need to practice interacting with people who speak the language.
How can you develop the informal (ไม่เป็นทางการ) way of speaking and sound more conversational?
One of the keys to sound natural is to learn phrasal verbs. They’re like your standard vocabulary but with multiple words.
verb + particle (preposition/adverb)
Examples: run into, get up, get along, set up, point out, look up.
So what you need to do is to be familiar with the most commonly used phrasal verbs that you hear every day. You can also observe and find them in movies. But be careful with some words that should not be taken literally.
Like, look up, which means to check and not looking up in the sky.
I looked up difficult words in the thesaurus because our teacher asked us to do so. I just learned that thesaurus is not a word geek reptile.
- get along (เข้ากัน) – to be on good terms, in a good relationship
- look up (ค้นหา) – search or check
- point out ( บ่งชัด ) – call attention, inform (to make someone aware)
- run into (พบพาน | โดยบังเอิญ ) – unexpectedly encounter someone
- get up ( ยืนขึ้น, ตื่น, มีชุดสูทที่ดี) – stand up, have a nice suit
- set up (สร้างขึ้น, จัดตั้งขึ้น, กับดัก) – put into order, make-ready of something for someone to use, trap
- figure out (คิดตก) – find a solution
To develop your comprehension and speaking, you can add phrasal verbs to your memorizing vocabulary routine.