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Ex: English studies would not be complete without Aesop Fables. Learning the stories is the only way you can understand common phrases / idioms like "sour grape
by morsch 5y ago
Ex: English studies would not be complete without Aesop Fables. Learning the stories is the only way you can understand common phrases / idioms like "sour grapes".
Most of the vocabulary you pick up from context; idioms aren't fundamentally different from other parts of the language in that regard. You don't need to know an idiom's source material to understand its meaning, no more than you need to be aware of a word's etymology to use it. Though it doesn't hurt and it's often fascinating.
- teachrdan 5y agoFrom a practical perspective, I believe the whole point is that an idiom is fundamentally different. If you are a non-native speaker, you can look up a word you don't know. But if it's an idiomatic phrase, like "waiting for the other shoe to drop," looking up each word in the phrase does you no good. Studying fables etc. is a great way to learn them.
- faitswulff 5y agoI'm a native English speaker and I actually have no idea where "waiting for the other shoe to drop" comes from, but I know its idiomatic meaning.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoSame here, and another one that irritates me is "being left high and dry", which is a bad thing. But I envision high and dry as a good thing, isn't that where you would want to be in a storm or at sea? Truth be told I never actually looked up where a lot of these idioms come from. I just heard other people using them and then I started to use them too.
- martyvis 5y agoBut not if you tied your boat up in a harbour, and then when the tide went out, you can't sail it because it is high and dry sitting on it's hull instead of floating.
- jquery 5y agoYou can look up the entire phrase or just ask someone. There’s no need to know where it came from, although it might make retention easier, or comprehension better. Nothing beats time spent immersed in the language and just asking questions or looking at context when something seems odd. Living languages aren’t static targets either, you’ll sound formal or just plain strange if you elevate dictionary definitions over experience and practice with common usage.
- morsch 5y agoThese days, you can easily look them up. To viz: https://dict.leo.org/german-english/waiting%20for%20the%20other%20shoe%20to%20drop https://dict.leo.org/german-english/waiting%20for%20the%20ot... Interestingly, the first given translation is itself an idiom (lit. "to wait for the thick/fat end"). An idiom I understand, even though I had no idea where it's from; I looked it up, it relates to corporal punishment. The second translation is a more generic one.
- FearNotDaniel 5y agoThe second translation is a biblical reference, where a "Hiobsbotschaft" implies receiving news of a further tragedy, invoking the Old Testament character Job (Hiob), whose faith was tested by suffering great losses. Unfortunately neither of these help to understand the English shoe idiom which I, as a native English speaker, have no clue about.
- int_19h 5y agoIn some cases, there's an equivalent idiom in the native language, and while the scenario may be very different, the underlying similarity is readily apparent.
- guelo 5y agoThese idioms are basically compound words, the meaning is barely related to the component words.
- dragontamer 5y agoA good example of this, in English, is the meaning of the phrase "O.K.", which is "oll komplete", a funny 1700s-era meme when newspapers (at the time) would misspell words on purpose. Most of those misspellings have been forgotten, but the most common: Oll Komplete (All Complete) was so common, it became ingrained in our language. Today, everyone knows things are Okay, despite not remembering the original story. ------- Still, learning some degree of stories helps remind us that not all words are to be taken literally in a language. That meanings are assigned based off of shared experiencnes.
- robocat 5y ago> which is "oll komplete" There is no definitive answer for the etymology of OK - your declaration certainly isn’t a fact. And it wasn’t in the 1700’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_etymologies_of_OK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_etymologies_o...
- jamiek88 5y agoYeah this is apocryphal at best.
- popcube 5y agoum, at least this is more important in Japanese and Chinese. in another way, usually people should rely on this to memorize it.