As a native speaker, how did you manage to memorize all these preposition pairs

A google search suggests that humans usually become fluent in our native language around the age of 7-8. When we were born, we then had 4-5 years of growing up probably without schooling, and then 3-4 years probably with some formal schooling. So across those \~8 years of oportunities to learn English we apparently memorise how prepositions work. I'd bet that if you had 7-8 years where you only had child-level responsibilities and focussed on English communication, then you'd probably be able to remmber them too!

Because we learned to speak through immersion without filtering through another language. So it becomes natural to just know what prepositions tend to follow what words. I recommend learning them as set phrases rather than individual words to be mixed and matched. Like "be capable of" is a set phrase and you should learn it that way.

From use, mostly. Or reading them. Exposure, basically.

Just through repeated exposure (reading a lot helps, especially with the less common ones). They're pretty much all just collocations - one preposition just "naturally" "goes with" one verb, etc. There's nothing really conscious about it.


What are the verb-preposition relationships like in your language? For me (an English speaker) studying French and Latin, they seemed fiendishly random. It’s only as an adult that I have realized that English is no different.

Human brains function differently before the age of about 10 years old. All these items are memorized automatically and with minimal difficulty. It's just part of the lexical entries for the words. For small children sometimes all it takes is to hear it once and it's imprinted for life. This applies to all languages, not just English.

We give absolutely zero thought to it

These aren't prepositions - they are particles, and must be learned with the (phrasal) verb. We learn them through use.

It “just sounds right” to us. I assume that as children, whenever we hear the words “capable” or “clever,” we’re often hearing the correct preposition at the same time. So as we acquire the words “capable” and “clever,” we’re also learning that “capable” always goes with “of” and “clever” always goes with “at.” I have 2 little kids and definitely hear them make those kinds of usage errors all the time, so there’s still a learning curve - it just happens when you’re a toddler or preschooler. If it’s any consolation, I find it challenging to figure out which prepositions to use in my second language, too.

To tell the truth, very little was taught, much was just picked up from listening and reading books. On this forum I sometimes question myself thinking, I know that answer, but what's the actual rule of grammar that applies like verb,noun,subject, blah blah blah? I get as much out of this forum as people asking questions.

You just learn it through exposure and anything else feels wrong. A native speaker of English will generally know little to nothing about English unless they’ve actually taken classes.

People don't, and can't, really learn languages by memorizing. It's more like learning to ride a bike. You just do it until you can do it without thinking about it. When you're a kid, it's super easy. When you're an adult, it isn't.

I’m 38 and have been an American-English speaker my whole life. I still question if I get them correct at times.

Is this even a question that needs to be asked? How did you learn whatever grammar points you had to learn in your own native language? You learn as you go along by listening and observing what other people say, period! I’m American and as my first French teacher said, “When you were a toddler, your parents didn’t sit you down with an English textbook to teach you how to speak English.” Don’t overthink it. No native speaker memorizes a list of preposition pairs. Just learn what goes with what as you hear it and move on from there.

I never even considered this until I started trying to learn them in French. Some of them totally make sense, but then you have some that change the meaning entirely based on the preposition you use and others that just don't have anything close to an English equivalent.

As others have said, it just comes naturally to us! In the same light, we never had to consciously memorize the order that different adjectives take before a noun; every native speaker knows that it’s always an “adorable, little, old, white, Spanish-style house” and never an “old, white, adorable, Spanish-style, little house.” Edit: typo

If it makes you feel better, although we do end up learning them naturally we can occasionally forget which one to use for what prepositional phrase or verb. A good example is the verb “to dissent”, which is intransitive and therefore requires an indirect object after it, marked by a preposition. I couldn’t tell you if this preposition would be “[to dissent] from”; it probably is, but I struggle with this one often.

The **vast** majority of native English speakers have got absolutely no idea what a "preposition pair" is. They learned English by copying others, and when they got things wrong, they were corrected. They learned by doing it, and - crucially - by making mistakes. Not by studying it.

It just happens naturally as you learn the words, that they can go with some but not others. “Capable” is a word that goes with “of” but not “at”. It is engrained from all forms of media, because you never see “at”.

Exposure, 24/7 for our entire lives is pretty effective

Each phrasal verb functions as a single lexical unit. We memorized them the same way we memorized single words like "supply", "handsome", or "breakfast".

I honestly couldn't tell you the rules behind it other certain words sound right

How did you manage to memorize all the [random thing about your language]? I'm betting you didn't. Nor did we.

I spent 18 years living with two native English speakers (my parents) who patiently corrected every mistake I made. I also didn’t know any other language before.

As a human, how did you memorize all your fingers and toes? Did you make a list of them?

To add to what everyone else has said, I will say my brain expects prepositions to be important and perhaps also to vary. So when I’m learning French, I instinctively pay attention to whether de or à follows a verb and if you can use both, my brain easily marks these different preposition uses as different meanings (parler à = talk to, parler de = talk about, completely different in my mind). English has created an expectation that preposition use will carry important meaning. So to answer your question, prepositions aren’t rule driven, they are part of the word phrase. It’s more of an etymological question than a grammar question why different prepositions pair with different words.

how do you learn stupid shit in your language? you don't really it just comes naturally. Most English speakers don;t even realise that these exist, or prepositions and especially articles (at least by those names)

We didn't learn them consciously in the way you're talking about, we just kind of absorbed them after getting so much exposure to the language and hearing it being used around us 24/7. If anything, that's what I recommend to you as well - get as much exposure to the language as possible because you'll start picking up on these little things more naturally

prepositions are always the hardest part of every language. to be honest op, it’s fully impossible to fully master prepositions in a language other than your native one

I would say that it it primarily through absorption and linguistic osmosis. That being said, I had one English teacher in early high school who literally gave us a sheet of the fifty most-common prepositions and told us we had to have is memorized for a test later in the year, much like how we do "times tables" for multiplication.

I read a lot of books as a kid. I didn't have any friends or anything else to do, so all I would do was read. I think that's one way to do it. learning by immersion.

You will be able to make yourself understood, ask others. Some vary. By accident, English. On accident, American English.

I don't even know what a proposition pair is. Lots of listening to our parents

It’s probably not much use to ask how a native speaker did this, because that won’t be applicable to you as someone learning English as a foreign language. German has a similar thing, where there are verbs that match with various prepositions. I can say, from my experience learning German as a foreign language (as a native English speaker), that what was best for me was to learn the verb together with the preposition (and also the case, which thankfully English doesn’t have to worry about!) So I wouldn’t approach things separately like “think”->”denken” and “about”->(um, an, etc.). I would instead approach learning the pair as a whole: “think about” -> “denken an”. I would imagine a similar thing would work for learning from your native language into English.

It comes naturally when you're a kid and are surrounded by people using it properly. You also briefly learn it in school, but it's usually easy considering it just feels natural.

You have to learn each verb as one unit because most times, the pairing doesn’t make any sense. Let’s take the verb to turn — usually means to twist something, flip, or rotate. In very few of the following instances does it actually mean “to twist” To turn in — submit a piece of work or to go to sleep To turn up — to increase the volume of something or to attend a place To turn down — to decrease the volume, or deny someone, usually romantically. To turn out — an impersonal verb usually used in the construction “it turns out” which introduces a statement, increasingly this statement is sarcastic as in if someone burned themselves on a stove, one might say “it turns out, the stove is hot!” To make fun of them. To turn away — to decline someone, or a request. To turn around — to spin (for a person, usually just from front to back, and then to the front again, or to change a situation from bad to good. To turn over — to flip something from one side to another (usually a piece of paper) or give something (has a tinge of reluctance to it, like you don’t want to)

Native speakers don't really think about these things, it's just how the language is spoken.

We simply learn it, assumably by the same method you learned the simple grammar of your own language. Basically, by life-long immersion. We do get taught it in schools as well, but it’s mostly just by being constantly surrounded by the English language.

It’s just something you develop an ear for. Prepositions in English are notoriously tricky. As you become more comfortable in the language, you’ll start to develop a sense for what “sounds” right.

Unfortunately you just grow up with it, and anything else sounds wrong. Half the time when I see these posts and someone asks a technical question "why is it like this in english?" I have no idea what the grammar rules are for it, I just know what sounds right and what sounds wrong.

We just kind of learn them naturally. That’s about it.

I really don't have a clue. It just came naturally from learning the language and being surrounded by it on the daily.

Native speakers don't have to memorise anything. That's the point of being a native speaker - we acquired rules naturally, we didn't have to learn them. If the question you really want to ask is **'How can an English learner memorise preposition pairs?'**, I think the answer is how can anyone memorise anything? Maybe flashcards, maybe recording them and listening to them again and again. In fact, this post has given me an idea. I run an app that has vocabulary playlists that you can listen to for memorising stuff like this. We don't yet have a list for preposition pairs, but I'll add very soon. You can find the app here: [https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/often-daily-language-practice/id6599847742](https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/often-daily-language-practice/id6599847742) (And it's also on Android)

There are some patterns. Adjectives that describe skill level always take "at": Good at, bad at, great at, awful at, clever at... But also keep in mind that native speakers don't learn words from vocabulary lists (for the most part), we learn words by hearing them used in context. We don't really have to memorize that the correct preposition for "capable" is "of", because half of the time that we hear the word capable, it's part of the phrase "capable of". As you get more exposure to the language, you'll naturally start to pick these things up too.

As a narive speaker I had to read these answers to understand what your question meant. It's just 'in there' but I don't even know the terminology to describe it!

By hearing them many times since before we were born, during the time when our brains were developing and always paired consistently and correctly. The same way you learned your native language.

Native speakers don't memorize stuff like that. From my own experience learning Ukrainian, I would suggest that memorizing pairings like this just takes a lot of time and repetition by reading a large volume of material.

All the phrasal terms act like they are a word in themselves. Capable is a different word in my mind to capable of, for example. Each is learned separately.

ngl i couldn’t even tell you what a preposition is