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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The stories of children in Iraq during the past two decades have received a number of important scientific studies. Despite tyranny of the historical study method on most of these studies, they have been and still are very important, because they have established a chronicle of this literary style that has been neglected and based not only on the academic level and serious in-depth university studies but also on the enclosed sight that doesn’t consider studied art as an innovation with its specificity and its typical technical components. While many of the public impressions and self-reflections contributed to the dominance of some of the provisions and concepts that were circulated as critical remarks and adopted by som
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Active Learning And Creative Thinking
The research aimed at designing a teaching aid for learning backswing into handstand as well as identifying its effect on learning skill performance. The researchers hypothesized statistical differences between pre and post-tests in favor of the research group. They used the experimental method on six (13 – 16) year–old Baghdad club gymnasts. The researchers used the one group design in which all players perform pretests followed by special tests on the teaching aid than are tested posttests. The researchers conclude that the teaching aid positively affected learning the skill as well as the teaching aid was very good and endured the performance of all gymnasts. The researcher recommended making simi
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The present study is entitled “Problems of Translating Holy Qur’an Antonyms into German: An Analytical Study”. It discusses some of the problems of translating Holy Qur’an verses that contain words so opposite in meaning to another word. The main concern of the study stresses some of the errors in translating the oppositeness of certain words of Holy Qur’an from Arabic into other languages like German, a problem that can be traced back to the fact that such words may have two opposites in meaning, one is considered and the other is completely neglected.
The errors in translating al Qur’an Antonyms can be summarized for several reasons: literal translation, ignorance of the different view
... Show MoreThe study aims at knowing the relationship between retirement problems and psychological flexibility, besides identifying the difference of retirement problems and psychological flexibility due to the wok place variable and sex variable.
The study sample consists of 250 registered retirees in both associations of the government and the UNRWA. The researcher had prepared and used a retirement problems scale and a psychological flexibility scale. The study findings show the following:
- The economic problems were greatly common by a relative weight of 76.3 %.
- The psychological compatibility was the most widespread domain in the psychological fl
BP algorithm is the most widely used supervised training algorithms for multi-layered feedforward neural net works. However, BP takes long time to converge and quite sensitive to the initial weights of a network. In this paper, a modified cuckoo search algorithm is used to get the optimal set of initial weights that will be used by BP algorithm. And changing the value of BP learning rate to improve the error convergence. The performance of the proposed hybrid algorithm is compared with the stan dard BP using simple data sets. The simulation result show that the proposed algorithm has improved the BP training in terms of quick convergence of the solution depending on the slope of the error graph.
It is a well-known fact that publishing companies spend much money, time and energy in designing their book covers to attract potential customers. As the first thing people do when they buy or intend to buy a book is looking at its front cover. However, if there is a need to know more about the book, people usually look at the information on its back cover. This paper attempts to explore the persuasive function of blurbs beyond the constraints of the academic domain and consequently their connection with advertising discourse in two main sections: The first presents the concept of blurb and its structure while the second defines persuasion and shows the most prominent strategiesused in blurbs. Finally, this paper gives the conclusion tha
... Show MoreThis study aimed at accounting for the role of talents management in consolidating organizational learning process at the Yemeni General Corporation For telecommunication. To achieve the objective of the study, the researcher designed a questionnaire and administered it. The sample of the study consisted of (166) employees (General Manager, Manager and Department Head). They were selected randomly out of a total Population of (291) employees during the Year 2019. The descriptive analytic approach was used t reach conclusions.
The finding of the study revealed existence of effect of talents management dimensions, all together and alone, (talents polarization, talents development, talents maintenance and ma
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