In a phrasal verb the particle is not a preposition that happens to follow a verb. It is the part carrying the meaning, and the verbs it attaches to are among the emptiest words in the language.
Get means almost nothing on its own. Get up, get over, get through and get by are four different things, and what separates them is entirely the second word. Which means the unit worth learning is the particle and its habits, not the verb and its list.
Eight to have properly, with what they actually mean
Each is the ordinary way to say something that has a formal one word equivalent. Using the single word is correct and marks you as a learner.
- put off the meeting, to postpone it, and it separates: put it off.
- get on with a colleague, to have a good relationship, which is different from get on with the work, to continue.
- give up smoking, to stop permanently, and it takes an ing form after it.
- look after a child, to care for. It does not separate: look after her, never look her after.
- turn down an offer, to refuse, and also to reduce the volume, and context alone tells you which.
- run out of milk, to have none left, which takes two particles and never separates.
- come across an old photo, to find by chance rather than by looking.
- put up with the noise, to tolerate, three words and no separation.
The saving, and exactly where it runs out
A particle keeps its sense across many verbs, so learning the sense once pays across the whole set rather than once each. Meet eat up, use up and drink up in a week and the pattern arrives on its own; after that finish up and tidy up need no explanation at all.
Now the honest half. This is a strong first guess and it is not a rule, and there are common phrasal verbs it does not touch. Run into somebody has nothing to do with running or with entering. Put up with is three words with no recoverable logic between them. When the guess fails, stop guessing: those are single vocabulary items and they are learned the way any other single item is.
Where it stops: which side of the particle the object goes
This is the error that outlasts everything else here, and unlike most vocabulary errors it is one a native speaker notices immediately. A separable phrasal verb takes its object either after the particle or in the middle, so I looked up the word and I looked the word up are both ordinary. But when the object is a pronoun, the middle is compulsory. I looked it up is the only possibility, and I looked up it is not English.
Learners who acquired phrasal verbs as fixed strings, which is how a list presents them, have no way to know a string can be split. They produce I put off it and I turned on it for years. The rule takes a minute to state and it is missing from most of the lists people learn from, which is why this stalls where it does rather than anywhere else.
The other half of the rule is that some of them never split at all. Run into somebody, look after her and get over it keep the object outside, pronoun or not, and there is nothing in the words to tell you which kind you are holding.
Where the object position is written down
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English marks it, free to read online with no account. Its phrasal verb entries print the pattern rather than describing it, so the entry itself shows you whether the object can sit in the middle, which is the fact you came for and the one a bilingual list never carries. It replaced looking up the verb on its own and finding an entry that says nothing about the particle at all.
Read the pattern before the definition. The meaning of a phrasal verb is usually guessable from the sentence you met it in; the object position is not guessable from anything, and it is the part that will be wrong.
What it looks like when it goes wrong
I looked up it, I put off it, I turned on it: the same error three times, and once it is pointed at, it is repaired in an afternoon. That is unusual for something that has survived a decade, and it is the reason this page spends its space on the object rather than on the meanings.
The quieter failure is stress. In a phrasal verb the particle is stressed, so she took OFF her coat, and getting that wrong makes the phrase sound like a verb followed by an unrelated preposition. It is not a grammar problem and no list mentions it.
The particles here behave nothing like the ones described in in, on, at, and the ones no rule explains, which is worth knowing before you try to apply one page to the other. Phrases whose meaning cannot be recovered from their parts at all are phrases that do not mean what their words say, and both sit under building the word count you need to say what you mean.
What follows is a question about which verb goes with which noun in the first place, because make a decision and take a decision are both phrasal in shape and only one of them is what English says: which words English puts together, and which it never does.