English Phrasal Verbs: Work Up and Work Around

Hello hello ladies and gentlemen, Chad here from RealLife English and today I'm gonna

teach you two more awesome English phrasal verbs.

So today's two kickass phrasal verbs are to...

And the conjugation of the verb work is regular so it is...

Notice I don't pronounce it work-ED. Again the pronunciation when it ends in a K you

add the ED it's a T sound.

So the phrasal verb to work up do not confuse with wake up, work wake, work wake.

work up you will often hear to work up to something, work up to something. This means

that you are gradually advancing and you have the end goal which you are working up to.

So maybe if you are trying to run a marathon you are going to slowly practice running maybe

5 kilometres then you work up to running 10 kilometres, then 15, then 20, then 30 kilometres.

You are working up to your goal which is the full marathon. With your English maybe you

are working up to a conversational level, or sometimes with my students I tell them

to watch movies and work up to being able to watch the whole movie with no subtitles.

They start with subtitles in their native language, then English subtitles, and then

they work up to no subtitles. There is also a common expression to work up the courage,

to work up the courage is to build courage and you often hear this when people are working

up the courage to quit their job for example. And another common expression which is similar

is to work your way up the ladder, to work your way up the ladder means your are progressing

in your company, at work. You are rising in position, you are working your way up the

ladder.

Today's next phrasal verb is to work around, so around means the preposition to go around,

and in this case to work around something it means to avoid a problem or avoid a barrier.

If you are working on a project and something negative happens and instead of solving that

problem your work around it. So let's say at your work you're having a problem with

the coffee machine, the coffee machine is not working so you might want to work around

it by manually making coffee, or using something else to make the coffee. Another example could

be if you don't have a car, something happened to your car and you need to go to work everyday

you might work around that by catching the bus, catching an Uber or a taxi. So it means

to deflect a problem by using a different solution, to work around something.

You also hear this as a noun like a workaround, so if you did make coffee at your work using

other tools you can say, wow that was a good workaround. It means that that was a good

alternative or solution to that problem.

Ok guys so now this part of the video I am going to say just one phrase and I am going

to say it very quickly using connected speech, try to listen closely and mimic and say this

exactly how I say it.

Ok guys that is another phrasal verb video and I hope your are starting to really get

some of this connected speech pronunciation. It's really difficult but the more you practice

and the more you train your mouth muscles it gets much easier and easier. You can go

back and watch that part again and continuously do that.

So thank you all for watching today and I hope you enjoyed this video. If you guys want

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