Phrasal verbs combine a verb with a particle (preposition or adverb) to create idiomatic meanings. "Put off" means to postpone or discourage ("We put off the meeting," "The smell put me off my food"). "Take after" means to resemble a family member ("She takes after her mother") and cannot be separated by an object. "Come across" means to find by chance or to give an impression ("I came across an old photo," "She comes across as confident"). "Run out" means to use up or expire ("We ran out of milk") and is intransitive.
Other common phrasal verbs include "break down" (stop functioning or lose emotional control), "look forward to" (anticipate with pleasure, followed by a noun or gerund), "give up" (surrender or quit), "get along (with)" (have a friendly relationship), "carry on" (continue despite difficulties), "figure out" (understand or solve), "bring up" (raise a child, mention a topic, or vomit informally), "call off" (cancel), "turn down" (reject or decrease), "pick up" (lift, learn, or collect), "set up" (establish or arrange), "go over" (review or examine), "get over" (recover from), "hold on" (wait briefly or grip tightly), and "look up to" (admire or respect).
Common grammatical errors include subject-verb agreement mistakes ("He don't know" should be "He doesn't know"; "Each of the students have" should be "has"). Pronoun case errors occur when objective pronouns are used as subjects ("Me and him went" should be "He and I went") or when subject pronouns replace object pronouns ("My friend invited I" should be "invited me"). Comparative errors include double comparatives ("more smarter" should be "smarter") and word confusion ("then" for "than" in comparisons). Confusion between "its" (possessive) and "it's" (contraction) is frequent, as is misuse of "who" and "whom." Errors also arise from mixing connectives like "because" and "so" in the same sentence, and uncountable nouns being incorrectly pluralized ("homeworks" instead of "homework").