The origins of this one are a little uncertain: the writer Jonathan Swift either coined or first recorded it in 1738 and it could come either from Norse legend, a twisted Greek expression, or just poor medieval street hygiene that left animal corpses to be washed out by rainfall. One of the quirkiest idioms in English is to say ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’ to imply that it is raining heavily. For instance, a Tibetan who asks if you plan to erect a beer tent is actually asking when you’re getting married. Others require a bit of grounding in the culture to really understand. If a Japanese person was to say ‘even monkeys fall from trees’, it might be possible to understand their meaning is that even experts can make mistakes. The meaning of an idiom can be simple to deduce. These funny little turns of phrase occur in every world language and whilst they can be amusingly colourful, they can also confuse newcomers to the language. There’s also the question of idioms: expressions that don’t mean what they appear to mean. This might include understanding whether to address someone as ‘Tu’ or the more formal ‘Vous’ in French, understanding German handwriting, and getting your head around cultural concepts of humility which will affect verb conjugation in Korean or Japanese. Learning a language would be a great deal simpler if all you had to do was learn the words and grammar.īesides learning their vocabulary, language learners also have to spend a proportion of their study time absorbing the cultural context for communicating with that particular culture.
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