ESL Blogs

Hello Guys.

Today I brought a topic that may be interesting for you. I didn't feel today when I was immersed in pondering in a local proverb to figure out that I had been using that proverb and hearing it for a very long time of my life without any thinking of the literal meaning of its composition. And you know! It sounded very funny when I tried to make an explanation for where that composition originally came from and what it meant!, because it sounded very meaningless.

It is still fun to try to connect between the literal meaning and the overall meaning of the composition. We can notice this “phenomena” very clearly when we try to make a sentence in English depending on our own native and very different language compositions. The words are usually rendered literally, but the composition is still different and has no meaning (or we can say it has mixed-up meaning).

I assume that this is what they call “expression”,
where overall composition only can give a meaning,
while words themselves can make nothing if they were taken individually. 

I give you as an example from my native language expressions:

•        Literal rendering: I have a dangerous problem, and I feel there is nothing comes to my hand that I can solve her.
•        Overall rendering: I have a serious problem, and I feel like my hands are so tied that I cannot do anything about it.

I believe that this issue still exists in our second language learning, but the more higher our English goes, the more we could adapt our minds to its composition. Here, we come to the importance of expressions and idioms learning.

I know I am neither a linguistic student, nor an English teacher, but according to my personal experience, I can suggest the following:

1. For developing our English acquisition,  I think that when we learn a new vocabulary, we should look up in the dictionary for the correct usage of that vocabulary.
2. We should also keep in our targets and minds to learn new idioms and expressions every now and then.
3. We should adapt our reading skills to intensive read (click on the link for more information) rather than careful reading in order to hasten our comprehensions, because most of texts are written to be comprehended intensively except the accurate or scientific ones. And this is still true for our own native languages (like the local proverbs in our topic).

With relation to proverbs, I didn't forget to tell you about the Arabic proverb which dragged this entire topic, but I intend to make it a blog itself. And I am gonna make it very interesting one (I promise). This is going to be after I have your feed-back about this blog (God’s willing), Because I am very eager to know about your local proverbs and expressions.