First, what is a phrasal verb?

The phrasal verb is a verb and a preposition put together to mean something crazy.

Lots of people ask me how can I learn phrasal verbs.

There are thousands of them.

English is ridiculous, Yes, I agree with you :.English is ridiculous!

There are thousands of phrasal verbs, how can you learn them all !?

Well the good news is that usually the preposition can have a general meaning.

So if you understand what the preposition means in general,

you canunderstand a lot of different phrasal verbs just from understanding the

preposition or at least have a good guess. So we're going to do this in two parts .

One will show the common meanings of "off ",and in the second part

I'll show you some more phrasal verbs with "off" which don't have that common meaning but are quite useful.

So the common meaning of "off "in a phrasal verb means to separate something.

Let me give you an example, what is the verb if I do this?

We can say tear or rip in a sentence, I ripped the paper I tore the paper in a past tense.

But the paper is still together, it's still one piece ,right ?

So, what then if I separated the paper by tearing it ?

Well,now we can use that preposition" off " . remember that that preposition "off means to separate something.

right? So I separated the paper by ripping it or by tearing it

We can make a phrasal verb with this. so the prepositions "off".

Its separated ,the method was ripping or tearing. So we can say as a sentence :I ripped or tore the paper off

Can I say the other way?

Yes.I ripped off the paper, I rip the paper off!

Okay, so you get the idea the preposition shows what happened,

the verb shows how it happened. This is dangerous don't do this okay?

what's this verb? "cut" ,right? It's still together so we don't use the preposition "off" in this sentence

I cut the paper past ,cut ,cut, cut !

But,

what did I do ?I cut the paper off ,other ways we can use this:

You know the phrasal verb to take off. For example, you get home and you take off your shoes.

Separate the shoes from your feet .Maybe you're very tired and you just want to

kick off your shoes.

The method kick and your hat you could take off your hat ,or you could throw off your hat.

Because you're dramatic and your life is a mess.

OK, so we get that common meaning is to separate from something, right ?

So how about another example . Let's say you with your friend.

You're talking good time, right? But then your friend says this: hugg, you're a normal person

So this should be your reaction, you want to separate from your friend by walking.

So ,probably guessed it