GET = BECOME / BEGIN TO BE

Hello.

Today's Daily Vitamin is the second in a series of five lessons that will concentrate on one of the most commonly used words in English: GET

One of its most frequent uses is to combine with adjectives, nouns or other verbs to mean 'become' or 'begin to be'. Its equivalent in Spanish and Catalan is often represented by the pronoun 'se'.

For example, in English we say to get wet / cold / tired / sick, etc., which means to become wet / cold / tired / sick. In Spanish the equivalent would be mojarse, enfriarse, cansarse, etc.

A few more very common examples with GET to mean 'become' or 'begin to be' are:
1. Get dirty
2. Get home (the more common way of saying 'to arrive home')
3. Get drunk
4. Get to sleep
5. Get angry

Here is a contextualised example for each of the above phrases:

Example 1: My four-year old daughter always gets very dirty at school.

Example 2: I usually get home very late at night, after 11:00 PM.

Example 3: When he was at University, he used to get drunk every weekend.

Example 4: I have been suffering from insomnia and can't get to sleep until 3:00 a.m.

Example 5: My partner gets angry when I get home late from work.

As always, I encourage you to write one or two sentences using the GET phrases above. You can post your sentence(s) on one of our social media sites (Facebook or Bluesky) and we will give you feedback about your sentences ASAP.

Tomorrow we'll look at a couple of phrasal verbs that use the verb GET. 

Enjoy the rest of your day!