The Importance of Opposite Prepositions in Literal Phrasal Verbs

What's up, what's up, RealLife English?

This is Chad and in this episode of RealLife TV I'm going to teach you guys the importance

of opposite prepositions and how to use them with literal phrasal verbs. Aww yeah!

Is this RealLife?

All right, guys, as you have probably noticed, English language is filled with prepositions,

and we use this all the time. So, just to familiarize yourself with the prepositions

first, let's have a look at some of the opposite prepositions.

For example, in, out. On, off. You know, even up, down. Away, towards. Obviously, we can

use some prepositions, we're also using adverbs as well, so, why is this so important in English?

Well, I guess, especially for a Brazilian, you know the famous phrase "the book is on

the table." But what happens when the book falls? You say the book fell down? No. This

is when we start to implement opposite prepositions. So, now, I'm going to use the literal phrasal

verb - "the book fell off the table." Why off? Because the book was on the table.

Ok, let's have a look at another preposition, the preposition in. What is the opposite of

in? If you said out, you'd be correct. So, let's say that my wallet is in my pocket.

But I want to reference the fact that it came... that it left my pocket, so I'm going to use

the opposite preposition. "My wallet fell out of my pocket." It was in my pocket, and

it fell out of my pocket. Again, I'm using the opposite preposition.

This is going to really help your English because we can even change the verb, and it

makes the situation a lot more descriptive. Maybe the -wallet- didn't fall out of my pocket,

but someone grabbed it out of my pocket.

So, depending on how the action moved, we're going to change the verb.

Ok, one more is the preposition up. The opposite would be down. So, this is very common, many

people confuse this.

So, let's say that I'm on the street and I'm driving my car, asking for directions. I asked

someone "where is the shopping center," or "where is the mall?" And they say "go up the

street and it's on your left," but, there you go, he's putting the verb and the preposition.

If it was the opposite, it'd be to go down the street, in that case. They work as verbs,

go up and go down.

But I can change the verb depending on how I'm doing the action. If I'm in my car, I

can drive up the street, or drive down the street. If I'm on a bike, a bicycle, I would

ride up or ride down the street.

Ok, so this is pretty much how we use literal phrasal verbs. On my last video I explained

to you what is the difference between literal and figurative phrasal verbs. If you haven't

seen it, click on this link and you'll go straight to that video right now.

But, in the last video, I gave you an example of the phrasal verb to run out of something,

and I also told you that that was a literal phrasal verb. So, same principle, to run out

of the building, which is what I said in the last video, the reason why I ran out of the

building is because I was in the building.

There you go, that's how we use opposite prepositions with literal phrasal verbs.

All right, guys, that concludes this video. I hope you enjoyed it, if you want to know

anything else about prepositions, using phrasal verbs, we have a lot of information about

this on our website. There's a link to our website in the box below.

We suggest you go there, because we have a lot of cool stuff. Also, if you want to see

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So, thanks a lot for watching, I hope to see you guys next time. Take it easy.