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A Study of the Problems of Learning and Translating Idioms
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Idioms are a very important part of the English language: you are told that if you want to go far (succeed) you should pull your socks up (make a serious effort to improve your behaviour, the quality of your work, etc.) and use your grey matter (brain).1 Learning and translating idioms have always been very difficult for foreign language learners. The present paper explores some of the reasons why English idiomatic expressions are difficult to learn and translate. It is not the aim of this paper to attempt a comprehensive survey of the vast amount of material that has appeared on idioms in Adams and Kuder (1984), Alexander (1984), Dixon (1983), Kirkpatrick (2001), Langlotz (2006), McCarthy and O'Dell (2002), and Wray (2002), among others. The paper concentrates on idioms as a learning-translation problem; it makes no claim to be comprehensive or academically rigorous. Leech (1989) defines an idiom as follows: “An idiom is a group of two or more words which we have to treat as a unit in learning a language. We cannot arrive at the meaning of the idiom just by adding together the meanings of the words inside it. E.g.John and Mary usedto be hardup (='They had very little money'.)”(P.186) To be more exact, an idiom is a sequence of words which is semantically and syntactically restricted, so that they function as a single unit. From a semantic point of view, the meanings of the individual words cannot be summed to produce the meanings of the idiomatic expression as a whole. Thus, fly off the handle, which means lose one's temper, cannot be understood in terms of the meanings of fly, off, or handle. The idiom phrase hot air, which means empty or boastful talk, is neither hot nor air; with hot air we are dealing with a set phrase where the meaning cannot be suggested on the basis of the two constituent words. The idiomatic meaning of spill the beans in So who spilt the beans (=told the secret) about her affair with David? has nothing to do with beans or with spilling in its literal sense. The foreign-language learner is left trying to figure out where and how the beans were spilt. From a syntactic viewpoint, the constituent parts of an idiom often do not permit the usual variability they display in other contexts. The point to be emphasized here is this: most idioms do not lend themselves easily to manipulation by speakers and writers; they are invariable and must be learned as wholes, but concord ofnumber, person and gender in the idiom phrase is still necessary, i.e. the verbs must be put into the correct form, and pronouns must agree with their antecedents: I don't give a hoot for her opinion! 2 • She doesn't give a hoot for my opinion! etc.)║He won, but only by the skin of his teeth2• She won, but only by the skin of her teeth• Iwon, but only by the skin ofmy teeth,I had to run for the train, and caught it by the skin of myteeth, etc.║He kept pullingmy arm, throwing me off my balance 2 • She kept pulling his arm, throwing him off his balance • We kept pullingher arm, throwingher offher balance, etc.2 The present paper is divided into five parts, as follows: Part I: An Overview; PART II: Learner’s Difficulties with Idioms; PART III: Some Pedagogical recommendations and Suggestions about Idioms; Part IV: Activities to Practice Idiomatic Expressions; Part V: Summary and Conclusion.

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Publication Date
Wed Apr 01 2026
Journal Name
Neurocomputing
Minion gated recurrent unit for continual learning
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The increasing demand for continual learning in sequential data processing has led to progressively complex training methodologies and larger recurrent network architectures. Consequently, this has widened the knowledge gap between continual learning with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and their ability to operate on devices with limited memory and compute. To address this challenge, we investigate the effectiveness of simplifying RNN architectures, particularly gated recurrent unit (GRU), and its impact on both single-task and multitask sequential learning. We propose a new variant of GRU, namely the minion recurrent unit (MiRU). MiRU replaces conventional gating mechanisms with scaling coefficients to regulate dynamic updates of hidden

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Publication Date
Sun Sep 01 2013
Journal Name
Journal Of Economics And Administrative Sciences
Measurement of economic returns and environmental and social for green sector trade A prospective study in institutions of Basra to focus on the electricity sector
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        Environmental risk growing Become challenge "and a matter of controversy and concern to many of those concerned with environment, social, economic, and the same happens with the administrative rather than in isolation for this movement, as the issues of climate change Disturbed and troubled him, especially after what caused the risk of destruction, and irresponsibility , chaos, and the futility of resources, crops, fields,  nature and homes and reactors, and after what happened in Japan from the scourge of "Hurricane tsunami " and earthquakes successive accompanied him and what became of him by surprise catastrophic affected the economy and the univ

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Publication Date
Wed May 01 2024
Journal Name
Diamond And Related Materials
A comparative study on the effects of multi-walled carbon nanotubes and graphene nanoplates incorporated for improved thermal conductivity and dielectric properties of polyvinyl chloride
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Publication Date
Mon Feb 13 2023
Journal Name
International Conference Of Computational Methods In Sciences And Engineering Iccmse 2021
Management of the flood disaster and assessment their damaged areas using remote sensing and GIS techniques: A case study of Tigris River – Maysan Governorate, Iraq
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Publication Date
Tue Jan 01 2019
Journal Name
Therapeutic Advances In Drug Safety
Deferasirox in thalassemia: a comparative study between an innovator drug and its copy among a sample of Iraqi patients
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Background:

The health care industry is witnessing an increasing trend in the use of generic medicines because of their presumed low cost compared with innovator medicines. The aim of this study was to determine and compare the performance of the copy drug Osveral®and its innovator drug deferasirox (Exjade®).

Methods:

A prospective observational study including 223 patients receiving the branded medicine Exjade®and 101 patients receiving the copy Osveral®was carried out. Data were assessed for a 1-year period and included clinical symptoms, serum ferrit

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Publication Date
Sat Feb 09 2019
Journal Name
Journal Of The College Of Education For Women
The martial rights and duties (Rights and duties of a woman and a man)
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This research addresses the relevance of men and women and the consequent provisions
such as dowry and alimony ... Of the like, marriage is to organize links masculinity and
femininity any sexual meeting between men and women a special system that must be
produces reproduction him and alone, which gets its reproduction in human kind, and has no
family and on the basis of private life is being organized.
The importance of the topic see Islam has urged marriage and forbade celibacy, and ensure
that the Lord of Glory Almighty married subsidy nor the origin of the differences between
men and women in money or workmanship or blue-chip Every Muslim inept any Muslim and
every Muslim efficient for any Muslim.
The impor

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Publication Date
Thu Oct 29 2020
Journal Name
Complexity
Training and Testing Data Division Influence on Hybrid Machine Learning Model Process: Application of River Flow Forecasting
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The hydrological process has a dynamic nature characterised by randomness and complex phenomena. The application of machine learning (ML) models in forecasting river flow has grown rapidly. This is owing to their capacity to simulate the complex phenomena associated with hydrological and environmental processes. Four different ML models were developed for river flow forecasting located in semiarid region, Iraq. The effectiveness of data division influence on the ML models process was investigated. Three data division modeling scenarios were inspected including 70%–30%, 80%–20, and 90%–10%. Several statistical indicators are computed to verify the performance of the models. The results revealed the potential of the hybridized s

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Publication Date
Wed Jun 07 2023
Journal Name
Journal Of Educational And Psychological Researches
Developing the Skill of Friendship for Kindergarten Children in the Light of Bandura's Theory Social Learning: Ministry of Education / Baghdad Directorate of Education, Al/Rusafa
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The current research aims to identify the effect of the program to develop the skill of friendship among kindergarten children, as well as the scope of the impact of the program on the sample. To achieve the objectives of the research, the researcher hypothesizes there is no significant difference between the average scores of the sample members on the friendship skill scale for the dimensional scale according to the experimental and control group. The research sample consisted of (60) girl and boy with age ranges (4-6) who were randomly selected from the Kindergarten Unity at Baghdad city/ Rusafa 1. The children were distributed into an experimental and control group, each group consists of (30) girl and boy. The two groups were chosen

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Publication Date
Sat Sep 30 2023
Journal Name
Al–bahith Al–a'alami
Political Use of the Photograph: A Semiotic Study of the Photograph of Al-Kadhimi's Visit to Fallujah on the Anniversary of the Victory Over ISIS
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The research aims to determine what a photograph intends to convey as a visual text. Photographs are not captured randomly, especially those of politicians. Each photograph carries a message, even if interpretations of that message vary from person to person. The research adopts a methodology based on semiotic analysis, applying Laurent Gervero's model to analyze a photograph of the Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi's visit to Fallujah on the anniversary of the victory over ISIS. The photographs in question constitute a visual language built upon a sequence of iconic symbols and signs. These elements coalesce to give rise to an image centered around a particular theme, one designed to convey a precise messag

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Publication Date
Thu Nov 01 2018
Journal Name
Iraqi National Journal Of Nursing Specialties
Evaluation of the performance of private hospitals from the point of view of the beneficiaries (A field Study in the private Sector hospitals in Baghdad)
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Objectives: This Paper is an attempt to evaluate the services provided by the private hospitals
and to identify the strength and weakness in
their performance The results can be utilized in stating conclusion and recommendations to improve
and activate the role of private medical sector in society .
Methodology: A questionnaire has be designed for this purpose and distributed to ( 132 ) beneficiaries
mostly from Baghdad private hospitals .
Results: The paper has come out with many important results . Among These are the following :
* these who benefit from services provided by private hospitals believe that the good performance of
such hospital is not due to the medical services alone but also to scientific aspect

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