a Phrasal Verb a week

Work something out

Well, we all know that 'work' is "trabajar" and those a little more advanced students are surely familiar with "this doesn't work" "the machine stopped working (=it broke down). ... So, yes, work also means something like "funcionar". Notice that metaphorically speaking, it's a very similar idea! So far, so good, but let me make things a wee bit harder.

Let's try to work out the meaning of "work out"! Look, I've come up with a fairly good example.
it means something like "understand" or "deduce" "try to find the answer to something"
eg. I know it is a strange situation we are in but we'll work out what happened" (=we'll try to undersand what happened).
have you worked it out?=  lo has resuelto?

This phrasal verb has also a number of other meanings, so remember that when you look up a verb in the dictionary (on-line or traditional), so my piece of advice is to pay careful attention to the different entries. The first ones are the most common meanings and the ones at the bottom, the least common and / or fixed expressions. Something to be careful about is whether the verb carries a preposition or adverb behind (or both!), as is the case with "work out".


look at the word order: work something it, we'll work it out. 
but i work out twice a week.
it will work out well/bade= saldra bien/mal
my relationship with... didn't work out
 

I could give you more detailed information about this but I think it's enough. We'll see how you get on with it and expand the explanations if you take the risk of using this target language!

I hope you like the idea. More ideas and vocabulary and L1-L2 mistakes shortly.

ps. in bold, other phrasal and prepositional phrasal verbs... arghhh!