Speaker 1: In the last podcast episode, I showed you some idioms
using the verb get. Well, after that, I was thinking
and just the word get all by itself has more
than ten different meanings and uses yeah get let's get going.
Speaker 2: Welcome to another Happy English podcast, coming to you from
New York City. And here's your English teacher, Michael.
Speaker 1: All right, thank you John, and thanks everyone. It's Michael
here from Happy English and I help people speak English better.
And this is Happy English Podcast Episode seven forty eight.
Eleven meanings of get. Before we dive into the different
meanings of get, I want to take a minute to
look at the basic get grammar parts are get, got, gotten.
That's American English. I believe that in British English they
prefer to use get, got got. For example, Jack has
got a new job. This is more common in British English.
Jack has gotten a new job. This is more common
in American English. And like I mentioned before, in conversational
American English, we prefer to use the simple past when
there is something that happened in the recent past, so
I would say Jack got a job. I'll save the
details of how Americans use the present perfect for another podcast.
And now let's dive into the eleven meetings and uses
of get. First of all, get means understand, and get
is a more conversational word than understand. For example, sometimes
when I watch TV in Japanese, I don't always get
what they are talking about. The boss speaks so softly
it's sometimes impossible to get what he said. And it's
from this meaning of get that we get the phrase gotcha.
I got what you said means I understood what you said.
I got what you said, I got what you said,
got what you gotcha, got it gotcha. Next, we use
get to mean receive something, and that's generally because of
another person's action. I got a nice bottle of wine
for my birthday. I got several emails this morning from
my students. Also in the receiving sphere, we use get
to mean buy something like this. I got a new
cap at the department store last weekend. I want to
get the new iPhone when it comes out. The third
receiving use of get is that we use get to
mean obtain or achieve, and this is generally because of
your action or your own effort. Tommy got a job
at the bank on Madison Avenue. One of my ace
students took the TOIC exam and got an eight point
fifty score. Moving along, where when get is followed by
an adjective, it has the meaning of become. It gets
dark earlier and earlier in the fall. According to a documentary,
I saw a baby elephant gets big very quickly. Keep
in mind get means become only when it's followed by
an adjective. If get is followed by a noun, we
can't use get to mean become. I can say John
became a teacher when he was twenty four years old,
but I can't say John got a teacher. John got
a teacher means something like John found a teacher to
work with him. That's different than John became a teacher.
Next up, we use get followed by some gerns. That's
the ing to mean begin doing that thing. One example
of this is get working, which means to start working
hard or seriously. We need to get working on this project.
The deadline is next Friday. I really have to get
working on clearing out the garage. It's a disaster. A
similar slang expression is get cracking, which also means to
start doing something. We also use get moving, with the
same meaning in slang, this garage is a mess. I'm
gonna get cracking the first thing tomorrow morning. Your exam
is tomorrow and you haven't started studying. You'd better get moving.
We also use get going, which means to leave. It's
getting late, I have to get going. We'd better get
going to the airport now or we'll miss our flight.
Get working, get cracking, get moving, and get going. Okay,
two more, get or get two means to arrive. We
can take an early flight and get to Boston by noon.
I worked overtime, so last night I got home after eleven.
And finally, get means fetch, which is an old fashioned
word that means to go somewhere, pick up something, and
come right back. For example, when I was watching TV,
I got a drink during the commercial Jack gets the
kids from school at three thirty. Okay, I hope you
got that all. Keep in mind, the best way to
remember this and any other world word or phrase in
English is to take that word or phrase, write it
in a sentence that's true for you or true in
your world, and then memorize your sentences and check this out.
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