"Give up" isn't "give" plus "up"

You can know every word in a phrase and still miss it completely: give up, basket case, green light. Meaning does not add up from the parts. That is why phrasal verbs, idioms and cultural references live in decks of their own in Riff, instead of hiding among the word cards.

The scale of the problem is well measured. Corpus research on hundreds of millions of words of real English has shown that a surprisingly small set of phrasal verbs, a few hundred at most, does the great majority of the work, and that each tends to show up in only a handful of its senses. The pedagogical conclusion of that research: treat these patterns as vocabulary in their own right, not as grammar trivia.

Riff applies that conclusion on its own ground. The catalog’s dialogue is analyzed to find which expressions actually occur in your shows and which of their meanings are in play, including the disguise problem idioms bring: green light is sometimes just a light that is green. Figurative use is told apart from literal use in context, and only then does an expression earn its card.

A separate deck is a promise: these expressions get taught as whole units, figurative face first, not left for you to decode word by word.