I find this week's lecture particularly interesting, as we are finally talking about how the society works as a whole. It does reveals alot of similarities and differences. The video showed in class was quite an eye opener, especially the part on idioms. "Crooked belly button."
Here's some other idioms from other languages, just for fun.
French: Panne d’oreiller: literally mean pillow failure, which is the English version of to sleep in.
German: mit jemandem unter vier Augen sprechen: literally to talk with someone under 4 eyes. But it really means to speak to someone in private.
Malay: hangat-hangat tahi ayam: literally for as long as as chicken shit is hot, which means until the enthusiasm fizzles out.
To a foreign speaker, these translated idioms are really funny. Imagine your French boss would like to reward his employee for working hard, and told him to take a day off to have pillow failure! I would be totally perplexed if I was that employee, I wouldn't know if it's meant to be a good or bad thing to have pillow failure.
This shows that cultural specific communication is hard to be transported to another culture, it may be functional to a certain extent, but it would require furthure explanation, and that's not without misunderstanding first.
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Its so interesting that each language has their own funny idioms! However, I think it is not clear whether these meanings are known to non-native speakers. For example, german speakers in Germany may speak and understand german differently from german speakers in Switzerland. So will the german speakers in Switzerland understand the same idiom or take the meaning literally?
ReplyDeleteAlso, is this a culture of language or place?
ReplyDeleteI guess the example of misunderstanding surrounding idioms shows that knowing the grammar and lexical items of a language alone are not enough to have full understanding of the culture behind a language. There are some sayings with fixed structures like idioms which one will need to learn specially via special explaining from a native speaker.
ReplyDeleteAs a supplement to explanations, I guess it is also more helpful if one personally experiences contexts/situations where a particular idiom is used, so the learner can better appreciate its relevance to the daily lives of a language's native speakers.
ReplyDeletei've heard of hangat-hangat tahi ayam as an idiom but i never thought of how it would come across to a foreigner. haha. anyway there's a modernized version of that idiom: "semangat 5 minit". it means enthusiastic for 5 minutes (and losing it after that) =D
ReplyDeleteIdioms are one of the most difficult areas to learn for a learner of a language, as I agree with Jiaxin that you simply cannot deduce the meaning from their constituent parts.
ReplyDelete