Hey English learners, welcome to another phrasal verb episode.
I hope you're doing great and that you're ready to learn a few new phrasal verbs today.
In this episode I'm going to talk about three phrasal verbs that sound similar, but they are used differently and have different meanings.
So the first one is catch up.
The second one is catch up on.
And the third one is catch up with.
So first, let me define these phrasal verbs and give you an example sentence of each one.
So catch up means to reach someone who is ahead of you.
So for example, I could say the runner caught up to his opponent and then overtook him.
So here I'm saying that the runner was behind.
His opponent was ahead of him and then he caught up, which means he was able to run faster, and then he was at the same place, running at the same speed as the other runner.
And then eventually he ran faster than him.
He overtook him.
So with this usage you'll often hear catch up to or catch up with someone.
It just depends.
But you can just say the runner finally caught up, if we already know the context, like he caught up to his opponent.
And now let me talk about catch up on.
This phrasal verb means to do tasks that you could have done earlier.
For example, I could say, I spent the weekend...
Catching up on my house cleaning.
In this sentence I'm saying that I spent the weekend cleaning my house, which is something I could have and probably should have done earlier.
So i didn't do it earlier, even though i probably wanted to, but now i'm gonna catch up on it.
I'm gonna do it this weekend.
And then lastly, catch up with this means to begin to affect someone in a bad way.
For example, I could say his lies, finally caught up with him and he was exposed.
So here I'm saying that he told many lies throughout the years probably, and finally they began to have a negative effect on him and people found out that he was lying and he was exposed as a liar.
So we use this to talk about things that people do that probably aren't good and then later on they pay the price for those things.
Eventually, those things are have their negative consequence on the person.
They catch up with the person.
So now let me talk about a couple different things, and I'll use these phrasal verbs in many different sentences so you can get a feel for how they're used and hopefully, by the end of the episode, you can use them as well.
First, let me talk about sports.
Let me talk about the fact that when a player or a team starts poorly whether that's just talking about one game, one individual match, or if they start the whole season poorly
Uh like uh, each season has a certain number of matches or games and maybe at the end uh, there's a winner based on who has the most wins overall.
So if a team or a player starts a match poorly, it's hard to catch up, and if they start the season poorly, it's hard to catch up to the other teams.
Like, for example, in baseball, there are nine innings and in each inning each team has opportunities to hit the ball and score.
They can gain points.
They can score.
So if a team starts slowly or starts poorly, they're not hitting well, it can be hard to catch up.
If it's already the sixth inning or the seventh inning and the other team is winning five to zero, It's hard to catch up at that point.
Even though there are still opportunities, it's not easy to overcome that deficit, as we say, meaning you are losing by a certain number.
So it's hard to overcome that and catch up, and so it's important to start the game well.
The same thing goes for the baseball season.
There are many games.
I think.
I'm not going to say the exact number because I might be wrong, but there are many games each season.
But despite this fact that there are many games, if you start the season poorly, it's hard to catch up to the other teams.
Even if there are still many games remaining.
It's not very common for teams that are in last place to win a bunch of games and then they're in first place.
That doesn't happen very often.
It's hard to catch up to the other teams when you start the season poorly.
I remember playing sports in high school and before that.
If we started games poorly, it was really hard to catch up.
If we started seasons poorly, we probably weren't going to catch up to the other teams.
That probably wasn't going to happen.
And speaking of catching up, I saw a video recently of I think it was these runners.
I don't know if it was in the Olympics or what, but this one runner was was about to win and she was already celebrating her win.
She thought for sure it was guaranteed, because there was no way the other runners would catch up.
But then one of the other runners was caught up to her at the very end and then passed her.
And then you can see on the other person's face that she realizes that she celebrated too soon and then she loses.
So it's possible to catch up when you're behind in some sporting event or some match, but it's not easy.
We shouldn't assume that we can catch up easily if we're behind.
Something else I wanted to talk about is falling behind in terms of things you need to do, goals that you want to accomplish, things in your life that you want to do, you want to attain.
There are many reasons why we might fall behind.
Procrastination is perhaps the biggest one.
We procrastinate and we don't start when we're supposed to start.
Wasting time is another one.
And even overcommitting.
Maybe you commit to too many things.
There are too many things that you are trying to do and you fall behind in each one.
So let's talk first about procrastination.
When you procrastinate, you might not think it's a big deal, but if you constantly procrastinate, this eventually catches up with you.
Over time.
If you procrastinate a lot and you make this a habit, it will eventually catch up with you.
And you'll realize that you can't finish things that you were supposed to finish, or maybe it's too late to start, or it seems too late to start and you feel like you have to rush things to try to catch up on your work, catch up on your projects that you were supposed to do.
A really big one is When you're in school.
A lot of times this happens in college in the US, in university.
People procrastinate a lot and it ends up catching up with them and they realize that they have little time to do their schoolwork, what they were supposed to do. and then they try to catch up on this work or catch up on their studying, and they have to stay up all night and not sleep because they're trying to catch up on everything.
And that fact that they're not sleeping well because they're trying to catch up on everything that can actually catch up with them.
Your lack of sleep will catch up with you at some point and you will suffer the consequences of not sleeping well.
And that can affect your health.
It can cause you to not concentrate well or not do your work well.
It catches up with you eventually.
And this is especially true in college.
I've seen this.
I never did this, but I knew many people who procrastinated.
They fell behind and it caught up with them and they rushed to catch up on all their work and all the studying they needed to do and it really negatively affected them and they didn't sleep well and It wasn't good.
So that's a big problem.
Another thing that can really affect you and eventually catch up with you is when you spread yourself thin.
When we say this, we mean that you try to do too many things at the same time.
Maybe you overcommit.
Maybe you have too many things going on at once.
Spreading yourself too thin can catch up with you and you can fall behind in all these different areas that you've committed to and then suddenly you need to catch up on all the things that you haven't been doing on time because you've been doing other things you've committed to.
This can cause a lot of problems for you.
Spreading yourself thin can catch up with you, cause you to fall behind, and now you need to catch up on all the different things and you might not be able to.
You might not be able to catch up on work that you've missed or projects that you've neglected, etc.
And one other thing that can cause you to fall behind is wasting time.
Wasting time not doing what you're supposed to do and doing things that aren't beneficial, and just wasting your time in general eventually catches up with you.
At some point, you will realize that You're not that young anymore.
You've wasted a lot of time and you feel like you're behind and you haven't done the things that you wanted to do.
You haven't accomplished your goals and you feel like you need to catch up, and you need to catch up on all the work that you should have done up till that point, work that will help you in your career or help you reach certain goals.
You need to catch up on personal goals that you had made for yourself, but you wasted time and didn't do those things.
So wasted time eventually catches up with you.
Unfortunately, this happens to many people and you'll realize it once it's too late and you'll feel like you're behind.
It's kind of hard to catch up on all those things that you should have done earlier.
So that's something to keep in mind.
So there are many ways we can fall behind and these things that we do eventually catch up with us and we realize it too late.
I hope that as I was talking, you were able to hear me use these phrasal verbs again and again and hopefully you understand how they're used now.
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All right.
Thank you all for listening to this phrasal verb episode, and I'll talk to you in the next one.
