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Learning idioms | ||
Tags: Idiom | Learning Technique/Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4636 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 1 of 5 12 August 2012 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Does anyone know of a way to learn idioms?
I'm finding that most of my misunderstanding is due to not knowing many idioms, and I'd rather not spend two months on an Assimil book just to learn some for my next language. The problem with watching tv is that usually they go right over my head if I don't understand them. There are also not many idioms in the literature I've read so far. Also, whenever I try to speak with native speakers, it's always the same, "so what music do you like, tv, how do you like living there" etc. Not to mention they English-hog the conversation. :P Should I just look for a book or just pay extra attention to tv shows? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Majka Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic kofoholici.wordpress Joined 4657 days ago 307 posts - 755 votes Speaks: Czech*, German, English Studies: French Studies: Russian | Message 2 of 5 12 August 2012 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I find idioms are better learned from reading or podcasts. One needs simply the time to process and notice it.
And two links for you, hoping you did mean French: from resource for translators and another one I learn idioms passively - I would read such list, as some of them come up either in speech or writing I would learn the meaning but don't use them in the beginning. One needs to be very sure what exactly they mean and when to use them. If the idiom is very common, the exact meaning and usage will be clear very soon. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4636 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 3 of 5 13 August 2012 at 12:01am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you, I was looking for lists like that!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 5 13 August 2012 at 11:23am | IP Logged | ||
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It is obvious that conversational skills depends on a reservoir of common idiomatic expressions as much as on sheer vocabulary size, and among those who have written about this theme and even made Youtube videos about it I think Splog deserves a honourable mention. For I time I thought that the word "chunks" referred to the kind of small, but indispensable expressions which he describes, but then I was told that it has a slightly more fuzzy meaning. However inside my head I still think "chunk" = "some simple expression or construction I definitely should learn here and now". And that's how I'll use the word below.
But there are also expressions which may add colour to your speech, and which you definitely should learn at least passively - but you can survive without them, and if they are slightly outdated it may not even be a good idea to use them. The first category can to some extent be found in language guides, but else you should simply take the expression you use in your native speech to keep a conversation flowing and find some parallel to them - maybe using a dictionary, but if you read literature with a lot of informal speech you may also make a collection from the things you see there. The second category can for some languages be found on certain homepages or in books like the 'big red book of Spanish idioms' which I sometimes read for fun. However I have tried a couple of times to check the frequency of such expressions through Google, and it turns out that the spread is immense - some expressions are hardly ever used, and others are fairly frequent. And even though such books often mark certain expressions as antiquated you cannot assume that expressions without annotations are common in practice. The first category does in a sense continue the fundamental parts of syntax, where you find pronouns and conjunctions and things like that. And the chapters on adverbials and exclamations definitely point in the direction of 'chunk' idiomatics. The difference is that the systematics of these expressions should be more along the lines of logic and conversational flow than structure. So you will meet things like the Romanian "iar" which is somewhere between "and" and "but", you will need expressions for different degrees of scepticism, and you should know how to express things like 'because', which in French would mean that you should know the difference beqteen "parce que" and "puisque" (and "car", to boot). All these things can in my opinion best be studied by staying alert while reading and lstening AND doing the things you would do while studying grammar, i.e. making a systematic collection, thinking about general principles and writing down your concluisions in some concise form - maybe even on the same green paper which I have recommended for morphological tables. On the other hand the 'pittoresque' idiomatic expressions should in principle be learned like the bulk of your words - but that can't be done. Even if you make wordlists with very wide columns it wouldn't be the same thing as learning single or compund words. I have tried different techniques, some of which deal with with the memorization process. The one thing I find absolutely necessary is that you always should be aware of the literal meaning of the words in an expression. It is not only easier to remember a series of words if you know their individual meanings, but you also learn something about the way of thinking of the native speakers. For instance "être dans les choux" in French is translated by reverso.net as "be in a mess, be screwed-up" - but in the French version there is neither screw nor mess. "Chou" is simply cabbage, and seeing somebody sitting in a pond of rotting cabbage is both memorable and indicative of the hopeless situation of that person. So always go for the literal meaning in addition the general sense which you might try to convey through some supposedly parallel expression in your own langage. One problem with expressions is to remember a good parallel to find a suitable expression for something you know how to say in your native or another. Dictionaries can sometimes help you, and the kind of expression collections in bookform or on the internet I referred to for Spanish can too. But personally I still crave some kind of systematic way to memorize such things systematically (as a supplement to picking them up haphazardly while reading or listening to genuine sources). I have come to the conclusion that the wordlist method needs one simple element more to be relevant for the memorization of idioms, and that is the notion of 'keyword'. If I want to express something in for instance Spanish and I know a good English expression, then I can in principle grab my 'big red book' and look an English keyword up, and then I see a number of English expressions and some (more or less close) renderings in Spanish. Inversely, if I want to memorize a nice expression in Spanish - which I may have found in a magazine or by listening to TVE - then I should jot it down and if necessary look it up. But on top of that I should choose one keyword in the 'translation' (or rendering) which can function as my memory hook later. It is also good to remember the foreign expression through one of its main words, but while working in the foreign language it is easy to forget that you may need something in your own language to nudge you in the right direction when you are standing somewhere on a street corner frantically trying to remember a certain expression. For instance the Spaniards can say "No se ganó Zamora en una hora" where Anglophones say "Rome wasn't built in one day". OK, by all means do remember the Spanish expression by the town name "Zamora", but you should also stick the Anglophone label "Rome" to the box where you store the Spanish expression. Because chances are that you will remember "Rome was not.." long before "no se ganó Zamora.." pops up in your memory, and then it would be nice if "Rome" could be used to trigger "Zamora". (PS I have reused this rather longish item in my Guide to Learning Languages part IV) Edited by Iversen on 15 August 2012 at 12:25pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5391 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 5 of 5 14 August 2012 at 7:48am | IP Logged | ||
I read through an English guide and saw many expressions that I use all the time as well as some I had never heard before so this can definitely be in issue. For French I worked through a vocabulary book which included a couple sections on idioms. I entered them into Anki to help them stick a bit but what that really helped do was "prime" me to notice them in conversations and in films/tv. I found some I heard all the time, some I never heard and some I heard some people use but not others (which is something I've noticed in English - my sister says, "The whole nine yards" at least once a day whereas I don't think I've ever used the expression). I found the time "wasted" on learning the expressions I didn't come across was worth it since the work I did with that chapter helped me understand quite a bit that would have passed me by otherwise. What else has helped: dating someone who was very patient and loved explaining new expressions. A friend/significant other can obviously help a lot and they can help identify which expressions you come across are commonly used and which are not. TV and films: you may be able to pick some new ones out if your listening comprehension is good enough. If you can get ahold of a transcript or subtitles that are verbatum then you can mine it for all kinds of expressions. Newspapers, magazines, ads, etc: writers love to insert idioms and sometimes turn them into puns. Some may be more esoteric than others, though (the more highbrow the source the more likely they'll use more obscure expressions). Also check out the cheesiest pop music. It should be full of cliches which make for bad lyrics but ought to help you learn some common expressions. And of course, use with caution. Get an idea of register (if it could possibly be seen as offensive or uncouth), whether it's exclusive to a certain generation, a certain class, a certain region etc. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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