Then they painted along to an episode of Ross' PBS show "The Joy Of Painting."

[kadioguy]

Re: Then they painted along to an episode of Ross' PBS show "The Joy Of Painting."

Kadioguy, most people stop looking once they find what they were looking for.

Do you mean most people stop looking the meaning of individual parts once they find the general sense of a phrase or small group of words they were looking for?

Am I right in thinking this?

 

[Tdol]

Re: Then they painted along to an episode of Ross' PBS show "The Joy Of Painting."

Who cares?

 

[GoesStation]

Re: Then they painted along to an episode of Ross' PBS show "The Joy Of Painting."

Do you mean most people stop looking the meaning of individual parts once they find the general sense of a phrase or small group of words they were looking for?

In an idiomatic phrase like put up with, it's very hard to discern any isolated meaning for the parts put and up. This is common in phrasal verbs and idioms. Therefore you could say that wise learners do indeed stop looking at the meaning of these individual parts.

 

[tzfujimino]

Re: Then they painted along to an episode of Ross' PBS show "The Joy Of Painting."

Don't worry too much about dictionary definitions. What matters is that you can use the word/phrases correctly.

 

[emsr2d2]

Re: Then they painted along to an episode of Ross' PBS show "The Joy Of Painting."

Once you know that "put up with" means "tolerate", what benefit do you think you will get from trying to ascertain why the words "put", "up" and "with" are used together in the phrase?

 

[kadioguy]

Re: Then they painted along to an episode of Ross' PBS show "The Joy Of Painting."

Once you know that "put up with" means "tolerate", what benefit do you think you will get from trying to ascertain why the words "put", "up" and "with" are used together in the phrase?

I think we take different approaches to this issue. For me, I believe if I know more "why" about this phrase, I can remember it better.

Yes, I understand it is so-called "phrasal verb", which means the meaning of it is different from the meaning of its separate parts, but does this simply mean we can't do any thing about it? I don't really think so.

For example, the phrasal verb "look after", which means "take care of" - we can imagine a situation that someone is looking after someone else and keeping her or him from something dangerous, so it means "take care of" (my guess).

I am trying not be a robot when learning English. I don't know - maybe I'm wrong, but here is another learner like me:

I'm a student learning English. Whenever I get stuck on phrasal verbs, I imagine the idiomatic meaning with the literal meaning and figure it out.

https://english.stackexchange.com/q...understand-why-put-up-with-means-stand-endure

 

[GoesStation]

Re: Then they painted along to an episode of Ross' PBS show "The Joy Of Painting."

Making up explanations for something is a good memory tool. There's no reason to stop. But asking native speakers whether these explanations are "correct" is often, as you've seen here, a futile waste of time. There has to be a reason that a given phrasal verb developed as it did, but the reason is usually lost in the mists of time.