Pavel looked at his phone and smiled. Julia, a beautiful Spanish woman he’d met several months earlier on his travels, was calling him:
“Hi Pavel! This might seem out of the blue, but I’m in town for 2 days – how about a drink tomorrow at the Bike Cafe? It’s been ages since we last met.”
“Julia, great to hear from you! How are you doing? Yes, let’s do that. At 3pm?”
“Yep, that sounds good. It’ll be good to catch up with you after all this time!”
We catch up with people who we already know. Usually it’s someone who we are friends with or work with (or in the past we were in contact with). You can also catch up with a former partner after some time apart.
The idea is that we haven’t been in contact for a while or for a long time, and so now we don’t know what each of us are doing. So we decide to meet up and catch up!
Perhaps a workmate who you used to see every day at the office moved to a new position at a different company, and you decide to catch up for the first time since he left the company.
Maybe you’ve been busy and you haven’t seen a good friend for a few weeks. So you call them up to catch up with them.
You catch up with someone:
“I caught up with Rob at the weekend. It was really great to see him again.”
Catch up on + something:
They caught up on all the news.
“It was great to catch up on things.”
[USA] Catch Somebody Up
I’ve heard some Americans say: “Do you want to catch me up?” = tell me all the latest news
A few more examples:
“I caught up with Helen last night, which was great.” [You can say this after you’ve met and chatted about things]
“It’d be nice to catch up with you after all this time.” [You can use this phrase to communicate that you want to meet your friend and hear how they’re going]
“It’ll be good to catch up with you, Jana.” [You can say this once you’ve decided to meet up with your friend or colleague ie you’ve now planned it]
The general idea of ‘to catch up’ is that you are behind and now you would like to be on the same level again. This is why you can also find similar examples like these:
“I didn’t do my homework for a week when I was sick. So I had to work hard to catch up.”
“He was falling behind in the race, but eventually caught up to everyone else.”
What about you – have you caught up with anyone lately? How was it?
If you liked this post, you might also like:
Spoken English Phrase – “That’s The Thing..”
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