Comparing separable verbs and phrasal verbs

Note: this is a part of the separable verb grammar point which has been excised because it's not useful enough to be included. Nevertheless, it's still somewhat interesting, so we saved it here.

Purely from the "separable" aspect, Mandarin's separable verbs have a counterpart in English: phrasal verbs (also called two-word verbs). While the grammatical components of English's phrasal verbs are different, the "separable" quality works in a very similar way. Take the phrasal verb "check out" for example:

• Check out my new computer.
• Check my new computer out.

Do you see what happened there? The verb "check out" can split into two parts (a verb and a preposition), and other words can go in between those two parts. Separable verbs work much the same way in Chinese, except that the two parts are a verb and an object (a noun).