20. Please Tell Me Some Idioms to Learn

Abstract : What is an idiom? The answer is both com­plex and fuzzy. This short paper is a col­lo­quial dis­cus­sion that begins with a stu­dent inquiry about learn­ing idioms and pro­gresses to the real­iza­tion that idioms are an inde­ter­mi­nate cat­e­gory which raise deep ques­tions about the nature of col­lo­ca­tion and cog­ni­tive lan­guage pro­cess­ing.

She was try­ing to be con­ver­sa­tional. “Tell me some good idioms”, she said. I’ve been guilty of revers­ing this as a learner of Chi­nese. “Tell me the best 成语 (chengyu) to learn”, I’ll demand of some star­tled Chi­nese accoun­tancy stu­dent or engi­neer. We should all know bet­ter. Not many of us can man­age the turn-on-a-pin­head instant wit of an Oscar Wilde, and how can we find a fit for those expec­tant ears in another head? So we mum­ble the first thing that comes to mind from tens of thou­sands of Eng­lish idioms or Chi­nese 成语.

This time I stonewalled the lady, not plan­ning to be rude, just a kind of sub­con­scious rebel­lion. “Some good idioms?” For what, when, how, why and under what level of threat?  She was ask­ing for a bucket of sea­wa­ter to explain the world’s ocean cur­rents. That’s the trou­ble with know­ing too much about a sub­ject for a 30 sec­ond sound bite (no arro­gance intended). She went off in a huff, look­ing for her sound­bite. After all, for a real answer there was always Google online, with zil­lions of sources and lists. The trou­ble is, they wouldn’t help her much unless she had a pho­to­graphic mem­ory, and even then not much either. Why not? 

The sim­ple answer is that so-called idioms flit in and out of fash­ion in the end­lessly shift­ing galax­ies of loca­tion, cir­cum­stance, social group, per­son­al­ity … and so on. I actu­ally see and hear new expres­sions every day, even after 66 years, or old expres­sions repack­aged. The hard answer is another ques­tion: “what the hell is an idiom any­way?” To that there is no easy answer.

Learn­ing idioms”, class­room style, is not just a prob­lem of mem­ory or con­text. The killer is that in any lan­guage it is not the case that there are just two kinds of expres­sion, a) sen­tences, b) idioms. It is not like water and ice. It is more like the colour spec­trum of the rain­bow – the colours shade into each other across the whole spec­trum of fre­quen­cies.

Related to the fuzzy ques­tion of what makes an idiom an idiom is another shock­ing real­ity, at least for lan­guage learn­ers. The “gram­mar rules” you learn from text books are NOT a sim­ple recipe for mak­ing Eng­lish or Chi­nese or any other lan­guage. If you mem­o­rized all the gram­mar rules in the best text book and all the words in the biggest dic­tio­nary, even with good cul­tural knowl­edge you would still not be able to speak or to write. It is a sad fact that hardly any teach­ers under­stand that truth (let alone their stu­dents, or school admin­is­tra­tors). In fact, very few aca­d­e­mics acknowl­edge it either, what­ever their pri­vate beliefs. You might just as well ask a room­ful of priests whether they doubt the exis­tence of their god. Such sanc­ti­fied truths were a big rea­son I even­tu­ally walked away from my sec­ond PhD can­di­dacy. That PhD topic was exactly on the ques­tion of what an idiom might be.

So do I have a bet­ter answer? In a way yes, but it will hardly fit a doorstop inter­view sound­bite, or even a Face­book post. Here is a dan­ger­ously brief hint about why lists of gram­mar rules and words do not amount to a men­tal lan­guage machine:

The human brain is a par­al­lel proces­sor, not a lin­ear proces­sor like a dig­i­tal com­puter. It works with prob­a­bil­i­ties. Whole sets of prob­a­bil­i­ties are eval­u­ated simul­ta­ne­ously, with out­comes merged to become input to new prob­a­bil­ity cal­cu­la­tions, and with remark­able speed out of that mess comes a sen­tence. I read some­where that an early satel­lite was lost because of a minor punc­tu­a­tion error in the con­trol­ling com­puter code. That’s lin­ear pro­gram­ming: eco­nom­i­cal, rigidly rule-based, but frag­ile. Nat­u­ral lan­guage gen­er­a­tion is not like that. It has mas­sive redun­dancy and approx­i­mate mean­ings. Near enough is good enough. But it is robust. Even idiots and savants can talk with each other. With nat­u­ral lan­guage cre­ation, streams of words or word-sets col­lect like a sketch pro­gress­ing to an oil paint­ing, pro­gres­sively gov­erned by many kinds of prob­a­bil­i­ties. The final word-paint­ing has a slightly dif­fer­ent mean­ing for every­one who encoun­ters it after trans­mis­sion, and each lis­tener reverse-engi­neers the word assem­bly accord­ing to prob­a­bil­i­ties that they have learned.

What does all this stuff mean for your life? What does the untidy real­ity of lan­guage mak­ing mean for the lan­guage learner? Think­ing about these ques­tions might not be impor­tant for you. Mostly your clever sub­con­scious brain will get to work and do it all any­way. That is really lucky. If you had to pass an exam on the sci­ence behind lan­guage, we would still be swing­ing through the trees like chim­panzees. The busi­ness of a lin­guist though is to fig­ure out just what is going on in your clever brain (not the street usage of “lin­guist” here, as in “knows many lan­guages”, but the tech­ni­cal use, being the sci­en­tific study of how lan­guages work).  Maybe you are just a lit­tle bit curi­ous about the lin­guis­tic ques­tion, about how you really make lan­guage. Again, in this place I can only give you a hint.

The key term is “col­lo­ca­tion”. If you speak the word “Fred”, only a lim­ited num­ber of words in Eng­lish can fol­low this word. Each of the words which can fol­low “Fred” has a cer­tain prob­a­bil­ity of fol­low­ing. If you “know Eng­lish”, you know this prob­a­bil­ity set sub­con­sciously. If you hap­pen to know a guy called “Fred”, and know his per­son­al­ity, the prob­a­bil­ity of which word will fol­low his name changes. Let’s say Fred is a wife beater. Then “hit” has a high prob­a­bil­ity of fol­low­ing the word “Fred”. Also “his” will prob­a­bly fol­low “hit”. The more words you speak in that sen­tence, the higher each prob­a­bil­ity for the word to fol­low becomes. In fact, if  you don’t hear one or two words, your brain might kindly put in the high prob­a­bil­ity “miss­ing words” and you won’t even be aware of it. Later you might swear to a judge with your hand on a stack of bibles that the sen­tence con­tained those miss­ing words (but maybe it didn’t!).

When you “know a lan­guage” what you really know is not a list of “gram­mar rules”. Gram­mar rules are just names for some high prob­a­bil­ity pat­terns, but they are not enough alone to make lan­guage with. No, what a native speaker knows sub­con­sciously are mil­lions of prob­a­bil­i­ties for word col­lo­ca­tions, plus count­less cul­tural and social con­texts which will influ­ence those prob­a­bil­i­ties.

Now here at last is the point about “idioms”. Idioms are just word col­lo­ca­tions which have such a high prob­a­bil­ity of asso­ci­a­tion that they become con­sciously rec­og­nized. How­ever, there are vast num­bers of other word col­lo­ca­tion sets at var­i­ous lev­els of prob­a­bil­ity and aware­ness. Some are quite fre­quent. Some are more rare, but still rec­og­nized by the mem­bers of the cul­ture or sub-cul­ture when they hear them. That is why we some­times have that sense of déjà vu when peo­ple in our home cul­ture are speak­ing. It seems that we have “heard it before”, but we can­not say exactly how or when.

Yes, I know this is all dis­cour­ag­ing. How can you “learn” mil­lions of prob­a­bil­i­ties? Of course you can’t, not con­sciously in a class­room. It needs a life­long process of immer­sion in a cul­ture and the way those peo­ple speak. Some peo­ple have a lucky knack for soak­ing this stuff up sub­con­sciously, and in my expe­ri­ence they usu­ally have no abil­ity at all to explain what they have achieved. Pro­fes­sional lan­guage teach­ers, in my expe­ri­ence, rarely have much under­stand­ing of what their stu­dents’ brains are doing when the “learn a lan­guage”. That need not mean that they are bad teach­ers. From expe­ri­ence the best of them have learned some paths that stu­dents can take on the lan­guage learn­ing jour­ney. Their teacher expla­na­tions might ped­dle mythol­ogy, but it often doesn’t mat­ter if the trip seems inter­est­ing.

Nat­u­ral lan­guage learn­ing is the sin­gle most dif­fi­cult thing that the human brain can do. How­ever, our brains seem to be genet­i­cally adapted for this incred­i­ble lan­guage learn­ing process, so most peo­ple can­not even see the mir­a­cle for what it is. That is why any back­packer can para­chute into a for­eign coun­try, stand in front of a class and think they are “teach­ing Eng­lish”.

Well, in this age we must have an app’ for every­thing. Mere human brains might be too hard to think about, so here is a bit of tech-candy as a going-away present: for the exas­per­ated and curi­ous, Google gives us one of the most fan­tas­tic lan­guage tools I have ever seen: the Google n-Gram Viewer at http://books.google.com/ngrams . Just type in any word or phrase, or list of words or phrases. It will show you the fre­quency of that word or phrase or idiom for every year from 1800 up to now. That can tell you many things (e.g. changes in knowl­edge, his­tory, atti­tudes, fash­ion, pol­i­tics, sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy etc). Have fun.


This post­ing is also on my main web­site, http://thormay.net at http://thormay.net/lxesl/idiom.html

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