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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 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.

From 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.

I'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.

Same 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.

But 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.

You 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.

These days, you can easily look them up. To viz: 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.

The 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.

In 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.

These idioms are basically compound words, the meaning is barely related to the component words.

A 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.

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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.

> 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_o...

Yeah this is apocryphal at best.

um, at least this is more important in Japanese and Chinese. in another way, usually people should rely on this to memorize it.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

Was just going to say, reminds me of the classic Trek HFY sequence: https://imgur.com/gallery/qSmHy

"what is the work 'fuck' for", the innocent young vulcans want to know. "surely there are more logical intensity modifiers."

"yeah, you'd think so," say the weary, jaded vulcan professors, "you'd really fucking think so."

It's not quite the same (less action for one), but if the "humans have crazy ideas" aspect is interesting, then the Starfleet Corps of Engineers (aka Star Trek: SCE) novels might be worth a look. Haven't read many of them myself, but "make things work any way you can" is basically how they function.

This quote sums up my Italian experience. The language is so full of phrases which - like everything - are regional, that Google Translate often just gives up.

My favourite is "in bocca al lupo", which roughly translates to "break a leg" - note the lack of verb.

Also that's the current meaning, which changed over the last century.

On top of that I remember three commonly used gestures two of which look the same to the uninitiated eye on photos.

Overall: his eyes red!

That's either a dog's breakfast or the cat's pajamas, but I'm not sure which, or which story holds the explanation.

A lot of slang was invented less than 1000 years ago.

I can easily imagine a hypothetical version of English that does not borrow words from Latin and in which 'spearshield' would be a verb.

kkndve English speaker checking in, I did not know that the phrase "sour grapes" comes from Aesop.

Honestly I only vaguely recall reading a few stories from Aesop when I was in second grade or something. Maybe a story about a wolf and another animal and a river? None of it really stuck.

矛盾 is Chinese.

矛盾 is used the same in Japanese - 'onyomi' words use Chinese readings of hanzi, as opposed to 'kunyomi', which uses the Japanese reading.

Though, as someone who speaks a little 日本語 (though nowhere near fluent), I don't quite understand the significance being ascribed here. There are huge numbers of Jukugo ("compound kanji") [which are frequently, but not exclusively, onyomi words] where trying to understand the word as a compound of the kanji/hanzi components would be equally nonsensical, and aren't anything that requires special mention in language learning. Having multiple readings of even a single kanji is also pretty normal, and sometimes those are not all readily apparent from understanding one definition, either. Also plenty of kunyomi words where the reading would end up with a word totally different from the initial kanji/hanzi.

To my knowledge, this is no more due to idioms from culturally significant literature than the word 'novel' being used to describe books and new ideas is.

Edit: Looks like a fable is the origin for the word in Chinese, but no mention of the fable when I learned it in Japanese, or indication that it was any different than any other word where the component hanzi/kanji (or radicals therein) would not make sense as the definition.

> but no mention of the fable when I learned it in Japanese

I personally learned of it from the Japanese game "Ace Attorney".

There's a spear/shield ornament somewhere as evidence, so the game spends a decent amount of time introducing the myth to the audience. The myth is seen again in Trigun (impenetrable shield was one of the enemies that Vash took down), and again in "Rising of the Shield Hero" where Shield-guy's biggest rival is the Spear-guy.

A lot of Japanese media talk about this spear-vs-shield story. If it was a myth borrowed from China, that still makes sense. (Aesop is Greek after all, but still influenced English).

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My overall point is that some words reference stories rather than the actual meaning of the word. Learning the underlying stories can help when learning those languages.

To me, it's interesting in the "Huh, neat" kind of way in the same way knowing the etymology of "sour grapes" is. At least personally, I don't find it particularly useful for actually learning the language - there's just too many words like this for it to provide me any real advantage, and I'd likely end up confusing myself more when running into the words where there isn't any similar significance. For example, irresponsible/sloppy is 'いい加減', and 加 means increase while 減 means decrease - I could see myself going 'hmm I know the word contradiction is one where the two kanji actually contradict each other... increase and decrease contradict each other, I bet this is it!"

The term comes from the ancient text Han Feizi from 3rd century AD China.

It was absorbed into Sino-Japanese vocabulary along with many other Chinese words.