Learning single words is dangerous

I once had a non-native English speaker say to me:

You need to put the T-shirt.

This conversation didn’t take place in a clothing store. We were not doing laundry either. It was in a place of worship.

Finally, after pondering for a few seconds, I figured it out. What the person was trying to say was:

You need to wear a T-shirt underneath your shirt.

I hadn’t noticed, but my white dress shirt was more transparent that I thought it was.

For someone who hasn’t mastered English, the word put is like a loaded gun in the hands of a child. Why? Because in every language, we usually don’t speak using isolated, single words. Like German, many times a verb like put needs a preposition like (e.g., on or in) for it to make any sense at all:

Image how difficult German would be if every word had 5 or more unrelated meanings like the English word put!

In some of these examples, put is used as a phrasal verb. That means when it’s combined one or more prepositions (on, up, with, off, down as seen in the examples above), it becomes a completely new vocabulary item that has nothing at all to do with its single-word verb form.

Like English, German makes heavy use of phrasal verbs. You will need to learn the phrasal verb forms separately, as if they have no relationship with their root verb forms.