Introducing: the Logic of English Prepositions

Every language has its own personality. You can hack that personality and start feeling the language.

In or on? To or for? Why does “have to” mean “must”? Phrasal verbs? What’s up with that? If you asked your teacher about prepositions they probably said something like, “I don’t know. That’s just what we say. You have to memorize it.”

Well, I’m happy to tell you: your teacher lied… Well, your teacher didn’t actually “lie” to you. They just don’t know that prepositions are logical. And that includes phrasal verbs. In fact, phrasal verbs wouldn’t exist if there weren’t a logic.

One of the main goals of English Hacks is to help you develop the hidden subconscious network of connections in the mind of a native English speaker. I understand if you look at English prepositions and you say, “They CAN’T be logical!” But imagine this: there’s a farm that grows a lot of plants.

Image by Arnaldo Aldana on Unsplash

On the surface, you see all the leaves and branches of the plants: the in-plant, the on-plant, the to-plant, etc… These leaves and branches are the different dictionary definitions that seem to be disconnected and random. These surface meanings are what native speakers are consciously aware of.

However, under the ground we find the root of each plant. The root is the logic that all the dictionary definitions are based on. This underground level is part of the subconscious mind, which means that native speakers aren’t consciously aware of it.

Another way to think about it is with the following image:

Here, we can see that the logic has a core and an area around the core. Many times, the surface meanings of a preposition will fit into the core of the logic. These are very clear and it’s easy to see how the logic applies. Sometimes, however, the surface meaning will be somewhere outside the core. The farther away from the center it is, the more abstract the connection. An exception to the logic would be outside of this area. And in all of the HUNDREDS of example sentences that I have looked at, I have not found a single exception!

Now, you can call this the “feeling” of a preposition or the “essence” of a preposition, or even the “main idea” of a preposition. I chose the word “logic” because, 1) the prepositions can be explained logically, and 2) we’re using a logical approach to discover the feeling of a preposition that a native speaker has, and that will explain how and why a preposition is used in all of these different cases.

In fact, we can take all of the information and put them together into maps! As I was reaching the end of my book I realized that I can actually visually show the relationships between the logic of the prepositions on a map. You can see the basic map below, but don’t worry too much about that right now. The maps won’t make much sense until you actually learn the logic of enough prepositions.

Basic Map showing the core relationship between “at”, “on”, and “in”. Don’t let the simplicity of the image fool you.

Now, how are you going to learn all of this? You can check out the book (and the workbook) on Amazon, but you can also find a video version on both YouTube and Facebook (the video course is still in development at the time of this writing). In both the book and the video course, there are a lot of example sentences. All of the important information that’s in the book is also in the video course, but there are some example sentences that are only in the book because I don’t want the videos to be too long. You don’t have to buy the book, but if you want even more examples for each preposition you can find those in the book.

Now, there’s one last important detail. Every language has its own personality. The prepositions are logical or have a core feeling. There are cases in which you might say, “Well, it’s very logical to use this preposition in this case, based on the preposition’s logic or feeling, but the English language doesn’t like that. Just like people, every language has its own preferences. So, instead of using this particular preposition, it might say, “Well, I like to use this preposition”, that actually touches the logic but doesn’t overlap. Most of the time, that’s not a problem, but there are cases where that happens.

Ready to build a feeling for English prepositions and start thinking like a native? Check out the book or the video course to get started! Questions or comments? Leave them down below. See you in the course!