If there is one thing that throws almost all my Italian students, from high school students to managers who work with foreign clients, it is phrasal verbs. You know to look, you know up, after, for, into… but look up, look after, look for and look into mean four completely different things, and none of them is about looking in a direction.
The problem is not your memory. It is that in Italian this category of verbs simply does not exist in the same way, so your brain has nothing to hook the logic onto. In this article I try to give you that hook: first the mental model, then the typical mistakes, then a list of the most useful ones to know right away.
What a phrasal verb really is
A phrasal verb is a verb plus one or two particles (a preposition or an adverb) that together create a new meaning, often impossible to guess from the separate pieces.
- give (Italian dare) → give up = to surrender, to quit
- put (Italian mettere) → put off = to postpone
- run (Italian correre) → run out of = to have none left
Italians do two instinctive things, and both are wrong. The first: they try to translate piece by piece (give up → “give on”?), and of course it does not add up. The second: they avoid phrasal verbs altogether and use the “learned” verb of Latin origin (postpone instead of put off, tolerate instead of put up with).
The second reflex is not a grammar mistake, but it makes you sound formal and stiff. In everyday spoken English a native speaker almost always uses the phrasal verb:
Wrong register: “I will postpone the meeting.” (correct but rigid, like a press release) Natural: “I’ll put off the meeting.” / “Let’s push the meeting back.”
The mental model: the particle gives the direction
You cannot memorise thousands of phrasal verbs one by one. But you can learn the sense that many particles add, and this helps you to guess and to remember.
UP → completion, all the way, increase. eat up (to eat everything), fill up (to fill completely), speak up (to speak louder), use up (to use something until none is left).
OUT → outside, exhaustion, discovery. find out (to discover), run out (to run out of supplies), figure out (to understand or solve), hand out (to distribute).
OFF → separation, departure, interruption. take off (to take off in a plane, or to remove a piece of clothing), call off (to cancel), put off (to postpone), turn off (to switch off).
ON → continuation, activation. carry on (to continue), turn on (to switch on), go on (to proceed), hold on (to wait).
DOWN → reduction, recording, bringing down. write down (to note), turn down (to refuse, or to lower the volume), break down (to stop working or to collapse), cut down (to reduce).
It is not a 100% mathematical rule, but it works often enough to give you an intuition instead of a total blank.
The most technical mistake: separable or not?
This is where the difference lies between someone who “knows a few phrasal verbs” and someone who uses them naturally. Some phrasal verbs are separable (the object can go in the middle) and others are inseparable.
Separable: with a noun as the object you can put the particle before or after it: Right: “Turn off the light.” Right: “Turn the light off.”
But with a pronoun the object must go in the middle: Wrong: “Turn off it.” Right: “Turn it off.”
This is one of the mistakes I hear most often. “Can you turn on it?” sounds wrong at once to a native speaker. The rule is simple: pronoun → always in the middle.
Inseparable: the object always goes after the particle, even if it is a pronoun: Right: “I’m looking after my niece.” → “I’m looking after her.” Wrong: “I’m looking her after.”
There is no foolproof trick to know which verb is separable: you learn it through exposure. But knowing that the distinction exists already saves you half the mistakes.
The 15 most useful phrasal verbs to know right away
I have chosen the ones that come up constantly, both in everyday conversation and at work.
| Phrasal verb | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| find out | to discover | I found out he had left. |
| figure out | to understand, to solve | I can’t figure out this problem. |
| give up | to surrender, to stop | Don’t give up now. |
| look for | to search for | I’m looking for my keys. |
| look after | to take care of | She looks after the kids. |
| look into | to investigate, to examine more closely | We’ll look into the issue. |
| put off | to postpone | They put off the launch. |
| call off | to cancel | We called off the trip. |
| carry on | to continue | Carry on, you’re doing great. |
| run out of | to have none left | We’ve run out of time. |
| come up with | to invent, to suggest | She came up with a plan. |
| deal with | to handle, to take care of | I’ll deal with the client. |
| set up | to arrange, to organise | Let’s set up a call. |
| point out | to draw attention to | He pointed out the mistake. |
| turn down | to refuse | They turned down the offer. |
If you master these fifteen, you cover a huge slice of real situations. Notice how many of them turn out to be indispensable in an email or a meeting: look into, deal with, set up, come up with, call off.
Typical mistakes of Italian speakers (and how to correct them)
1. Translating literally from the Latin verb. Wrong: “I need to individuate the problem.” (from the Italian individuare) Right: “I need to identify / pin down the problem.”
2. Forgetting the particle and leaving the verb “bare”. Wrong: “Please fill this form.” Right: “Please fill in / fill out this form.” Without the particle the sentence sounds incomplete.
3. Putting the pronoun after the particle (separable verbs). Wrong: “I’ll send back it tomorrow.” Right: “I’ll send it back tomorrow.”
4. Using the wrong preposition. Wrong: “I’m looking the report for.” Right: “I’m looking for the report.”
5. Confusing similar phrasal verbs. look up (to find a piece of information: I looked up the word in the dictionary) ≠ look after (to take care of) ≠ look for (to search for a physical object). The same base verb, three different worlds.
How to learn them without going mad
The worst thing you can do is study a list of 200 phrasal verbs by heart: after two days you will not remember even five. These work much better:
- In small thematic groups: all the phrasal verbs of the telephone (hang up, hold on, call back), all those of work (set up, deal with, follow up), all those of travel (check in, take off, get on).
- In context, not in isolation: meet them in a TV series, in a podcast, in a real email, and note them down with the whole sentence, not as a dictionary entry.
- By using them actively: the real leap happens when you produce them yourself and get feedback on separability and on the preposition. This is exactly the kind of targeted correction we do in the English lessons.
More than any complicated rule, phrasal verbs are what makes the difference between “school” English and English that sounds natural. It is worth working on them with a method.
I have collected the other mistakes Italians fall into most often separately: false friends, past simple and present perfect, the prepositions in, on, at and pronunciation. To practise reading and writing against the clock, try the English second paper practice test.
If you want to tackle them starting from the situations you really need (work, exams, conversation), take a look at the English lessons above or write to me to set up a tailor-made programme.
