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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
Sun Jun 01 2025
Journal Name
Iop Conference Series: Earth And Environmental Science
The safe house as a sustainable home -the Baghdadi house as a case study
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Abstract<p>A sense of safety is the first requirement for human stability in a place such as a home. Many local studies investigated Baghdadi houses and their architectural changes, but the relationship between safety and sustainability in Baghdadi houses has not been studied, so the research problem was: What are the architectural elements that relate to the concept of a safe house as a home in Baghdad as a case study? How is it related to the sustainability?</p><p>The research aims to identify the architectural elements of the safe house in Baghdad, to work on these elements by architects to enhance the sustainability of the residential environment, and create homes t</p> ... Show More
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Publication Date
Sun Nov 01 2015
Journal Name
Iosr Journal Of Dental And Medical Sciences (iosr-jdms)
A Comparative Study of a Topical Active Lotion Containing Triethyl Citrate and Ethyl Linoleate and Clindamycin Solution 1% in the Treatment of Mild to Moderate Acne Vulgaris
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DAIRMD Professor Hayder R. Al-Hamamy, **Professor Adil A. Noaimi, **Dr. Ihsan A. Al-Turfy, IOSR Journal of Dental and Medical Sciences (IOSR-JDMS), 2015

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Publication Date
Sat Aug 01 2026
Journal Name
American Institute Of Physics
A study of the Explosive Power of the Upper and Lower Limbs And Some Biomechanical Variables and Their Relationship To The Performance Of the Shot Put In Short Stature, Category F40
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Explosive power is a crucial factor in athletic performance due to its connection to the skill-based aspects required in every sport. Therefore, understanding it is essential for guiding research and plays a key role in improving shot put performance for short-statured athletes in category (F40). Biomechanical variables also contribute to shot put performance for short-statured athletes in category (F40) by helping coaches identify, diagnose, and compare technical and motor errors, their components, timing, and speed with the required performance to achieve optimal results. Thus, the importance of this research lies in the researchers' attempt to identify the relationship between the explosive power of the upper and lower limbs and certain

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Publication Date
Wed Sep 30 2015
Journal Name
European Journal Of Chemistry
Reaction pathways and transition states of the C-C and C-H bond cleavage in the aromatic pyrenemolecule - A Density Functional study
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The activation and reaction energies of the C-C and C-H bonds cleavage in pyrene molecule are calculated applying the Density Functional Theory and 6-311G Gaussian basis. Different values for the energies result for the different bonds, depending on the location of the bond and the structure of the corresponding transition states. The C-C bond cleavage reactions include H atom migration, in many cases, leading to the formation of CH2 groups and H-C≡C- acetylenic fragments. The activation energy values of the C-C reactions are greater than 190.00 kcal/mol for all bonds, those for the C-H bonds are greater than 160.00 kcal/mol. The reaction energy values for the C-C bonds range between 56.497 to 191.503 kcal/mol. As for the C-H cleavage rea

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Publication Date
Tue Jan 01 2019
Journal Name
International Journal Of Research In Social Sciences And Humanities
A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS STUDY OF THE TRUTH AND REALITY IN NEWS WEBSITES ABOUT THE WARIN SYRIABETWEEN AL-JAZEERA ENGLISH AND BBC WORLD
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BN Rashid, International Journal of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities, 2019 - Cited by 1

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Publication Date
Tue Oct 01 2013
Journal Name
Journal Of Economics And Administrative Sciences
The Relationship Between The Internal Marketing and Quality Services : a Filed Study on Samples of Customers and Employees In Iraqi Commercial Banks
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Abstract

The Paper highlights on one of the main activities in marketing management. That is the internal marketing in the commercial banks and its relationship with the quality services offered to satisfy customers needs and wishes in order to reach he ultimate objectives of those banks. Two state and five private banks in Basrah city (Iraq) were taken in a field study. The survey covered the opinions of (184) state bank employees and (158) clients . The analysis of the survey shows that there is a strong relationship between the internal marketing ( in the banks covered by the survey) and the quality of banking objective services and the private banks show greater interest and concern to the internal ma

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Publication Date
Sun Mar 15 2020
Journal Name
Journal Of The College Of Education For Women
The Use of English as Lingua Franca in the Classes of UKM: as A Case of Study
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           English has for long been one of the most widely used media of communication globally, especially in the Malaysian universities. It has been termed as a Lingua Franca because it is shared with other languages which are considered first languages by different speakers. For this reason, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has attracted a number of researchers to investigate its variety via other languages in various communities. The objective of this paper is therefore to establish the strategies which are employing by the international students at the National University of Malaysia/ UniversitiKebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) as an example of one of the Malaysian universities; when they e

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Publication Date
Sat Sep 24 2022
Journal Name
Arab World English Journal
A Critical Stylistic Study of the Notion of Women Empowerment in the Mona Lisa Smile (2003)
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This study unveils the ideologies of women empowerment encoded in the Mona Lisa Smile movie (2003). It reveals how the stereotypical image of women born only to be wives and do the duties of upbringing and housework is challenged. Katherine Ann Watson (Julia Roberts), the main character in the movie, wants to make a difference in the next generation of women. She rejects the imposed traditional ideologies. Linguistically, she opposes conventional thinking and seeks to persuade her students that life is about more than getting married. The primary focus of this study is to examine and clarify how the characters’ linguistic choices convey their ideologies concerning the notion of women empowerment. To do this, the researchers apply

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Publication Date
Fri Dec 31 2021
Journal Name
Political Sciences Journal
Pakistan: The most dangerous terrorist extremism hotbed (a study information, limitations, and factors)
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   Receipt date:10/27/2021    accepted date:12/15/2021     Publication date:31/12/2021

        Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The phenomenon of extremist extremism (terrorism) was one of the most prominent issues that took a large space in the twenty-first century, in which cognitive motives were mixed with strategic and ideological motives, leading to the emergence of terrorist extremi

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Publication Date
Mon Feb 04 2019
Journal Name
Journal Of The College Of Education For Women
Popular naming for goods and materials in the Iraqi slang "A Semantic Study"
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The current research is concerned with the prices of Goods and materials in the Iraqi slang a descriptive, lexicographic , and semantic study expressing the meanings of these names and their positions , as well as expressing the imaginations of Human mind , the popular mind in describing these goods with evaluating them besides the semantic of each word accordingly
The current research is divided into two parts , the first part is consisted of Vocalizations" words" That are arisen through cognitive naming that concentrate on the mental imaginations for the most important and sensitive such as colors , taste , shapes and forms impacts of Goods and materials according to users' ' taste for those words , on other hand, the second part of

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