After college I went to Poland and ended up teaching English and translating. The first day of class I asked the same question, and got the same answer. I nervously said we'd cover that later. Unfortunately, I'd never heard of phrasal verbs or prepositional verbs or anything like that. At the first break I asked one of my colleagues what the hell is this phrasal verb stuff - he patiently explained, in perfect English with just a slight accent. He of course had proper training in both teaching and the language - yet I got more money cause the parents liked the idea of 'native speakers' teaching their kids. Beginning teachers generally suck, untrained ones... poor kids.
And everything I know about Polish grammar comes from Russian class. I've never taken a Polish language class in my life, whether for foreigners or native speakers. In retrospect the funniest part of Russian class was learning about verb aspect, which is both one of the most fundamental parts of Polish (and Russian) grammar, and generally the hardest thing for (non Slav) foreigners to get - I had no idea that aspect existed even though I'd been using it correctly my entire life.
Clearly you haven't taken much interest in your own language. I love learning languages and still try to expand my adequate French, my almost-passable Spanish and my few dozen words and phrases of Mandarin Chinese.
As for phrasal verbs, I've known about their existence, and the problems associated with them, for... well, for a full six or seven minutes now... since I started reading the comments to this post.
Get with it, man!
