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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
Fri Feb 27 2026
Journal Name
Al–bahith Al–a'alami
Evaluation of the Iraqi Community for Election Campaigns for Candidates of the House of Representatives and Media Coverage in March 2010: (Cairo as a Model)
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The elections of the Council of Representatives in Iraq are one of the manifestations of political participation, which makes it attracts the attention of researchers. Where Iraq witnessed in 2005 important political events in the Iraqi arena, a pluralist parliamentary elections or elections in Iraq by direct free election on January 30, the first almost half a century ago. On November 15 of the same year, Iraq adopted a permanent constitution for the country through a popular referendum.

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Publication Date
Tue Dec 29 2020
Journal Name
Journal Of Accounting And Financial Studies ( Jafs )
Electronic Payment System and its impact on the efficiency of the performance of banking: An applied research on a sample of banking sector in Iraq
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The electronic payment systems are considered the most important infrastructure for the work of banks, particularly after a steady and remarkable development in information and communication technology, Which created the reality of the work of the infrastructure for these systems and these systems also become one of the most important components of infrastructure for the work of banks, cause it is one of the most important channels through which the transfer of cash, financial instruments between financial institutions in general and banking in particular.

     In order to achieve the objectives of the research, the most important to identify the concept of electronic payment systems, and its divisions, and th

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Publication Date
Fri Feb 27 2026
Journal Name
Sciences Journal Of Physical Education
The impact of a proposal for the curriculum dictated by some of the barriers to the development of motor skills
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The impact of a proposal for the curriculum dictated by some of the barriers to the development of motor skillsA. M. D. Huda Ibrahim RezoukiM. M. Susan Salim DawoodIs the childhood of the most important and most fertile stage of basic education because of their significant impact in building a base on which the stated origin of sound in the early stages older age because the baby at this stage be very vulnerability to environmental factors different surroundings in which to leave their mark on his life in the stages of life other.The Gymnastics of sports long-term training, which begins between the ages very early relative to the rest of other games to reach the stage of the tournament from the age of 13-17 years almost to the women, this a

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Publication Date
Sun Jun 02 2019
Journal Name
International Journal Of Multidisciplinary And Current Research
The security problem in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries Study on internal challenges and future prospects
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The importance of our research is that it examines the causes and sources of the security challenges in the internal security environment of the GCC countries, and aims to address the most important issues that are of great interest, namely, the issue of inter-GCC differences and addressing the issues of regional security for the Gulf region, After it is one of the most dynamic and more polarized areas for the emergence of threats and challenges because of the multiplicity of sources of threat and their complexity due to the specificity of the strategic environment and the negative repercussions it can have on the Gulf region, especially the issue of regional security of the Gulf Cooperation Council Which has become a magnet for competing i

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Publication Date
Mon Mar 08 2021
Journal Name
Baghdad Science Journal
Theoretical study to find the thermal stress and strain generated in the Wood silica using lasers
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In this research study theory to find the stress and emotion gases in the glass as a result of exposure to pulses of the laser beam has been the study using vehicles three major on-system axes cylindrical (r, 0, z), where I took three models of glass silica glass soda glass fused and shedtwo types of lasers where the study showed that the thermal stresses and emotions ...

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Publication Date
Fri Jan 01 2021
Journal Name
Indonesian Journal Of Electrical Engineering And Computer Science
BotDetectorFW: an optimized botnet detection framework based on five features-distance measures supported by comparisons of four machine learning classifiers using CICIDS2017 dataset
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<p><span>A Botnet is one of many attacks that can execute malicious tasks and develop continuously. Therefore, current research introduces a comparison framework, called BotDetectorFW, with classification and complexity improvements for the detection of Botnet attack using CICIDS2017 dataset. It is a free online dataset consist of several attacks with high-dimensions features. The process of feature selection is a significant step to obtain the least features by eliminating irrelated features and consequently reduces the detection time. This process implemented inside BotDetectorFW using two steps; data clustering and five distance measure formulas (cosine, dice, driver &amp; kroeber, overlap, and pearson correlation

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Publication Date
Tue Feb 26 2019
Journal Name
Journal Of Accounting And Financial Studies ( Jafs )
The Role of External Oversight in The Organization of Policy Import: A model of Supreme Audit
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  The construction of development is required to develop various economic sectors with the necessity to meet the various requirement of both individuals and institutions , or through the import process , which must be commensurate with the needs of the market and the economy and development. But in fact , we found that the process of import in Iraq after 2003 took a turn dangerous excesses on limits of philosophy and objectives of the import , which  reflected  the level of national production as well as the policy of dumping and given to the lack of matching a lot of goods and materials imported for Standards and Measures of quality and stands behind it causes many of them exposure to the market and weak sectors with an o

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Publication Date
Mon Feb 04 2019
Journal Name
Journal Of Accounting And Financial Studies ( Jafs )
The Role of External Oversight in The Organization of Policy Import: A model of Supreme Audit
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The construction of development is required to develop various economic sectors with the necessity to meet the various requirement of both individuals and institutions , or through the import process , which must be commensurate with the needs of the market and the economy and development. But in fact , we find that the process of import in Iraq after 2003 took a turn dangerous excesses on limits of philosophy and objectives of the import , which is reflected at the level of national production as well as the policy of dumping and given and the lack of matching a lot of goods and materials imported for Standards and Measures of quality and stands behind it causes many of them exposure to the market and weak sectors with an overlap betwee

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Publication Date
Wed Jun 03 2020
Journal Name
Political Sciences Journal
The role of the strategic culture variable in negotiations (Brexit a model)
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      Negotiations are distinguished in that they are an easy and simple means between the conflicting parties, and it is an effective means at the same time as the conflicting parties seek understanding on the most effective way to solve their dispute, but negotiations are not always appropriate to resolve international disputes, especially when there is a disparity in power between the negotiating countries, or when it is missing Goodwill, or even when one of the parties is absent or less flexible, and the internal circumstances of one of the conflicting countries may play a negative or positive role in the success of the negotiations, away from the influence of the role of external variables in that, a

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Publication Date
Tue Jan 01 2013
Journal Name
Brain Research Bulletin
A note on the probability distribution function of the surface electromyogram signal
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